Email this article

Art and New Mexico: A Partnership

The work of Bea Mandelman and Louis Ribak evokes The Taos Moderns and a defining era in New Mexico art

By Pete Warzell

Found in: | Inside | Art |

"When you ask who is my favorite artist, you of course mean besides myself," she said. I was standing in Bea Mandelman's art studio in the summer of 1992, a large room with an old wood floor resembling that of a gymnasium's. Canvases, lots of them, art pieces of Mandelman's that spanned the '80s and into the '90s, were stacked against the walls in a riot of color. Illness struck her shortly thereafter, or perhaps she had it then and either chose to ignore it or avoid mention of it to keep focus on the art. She was feisty to the end, driven by a fierce work ethic.

Hanging on the wall was a painting that Mandelman had been working on for some 15 years. "Of course I keep at it - it needs to be right." Given the prolific work and the stacks of paintings she had completed and signed, though rarely dated, her sense of obligation to art was palpable. She led us through the kitchen to a much smaller room, probably meant for dining, and her most recent work, an acrylic on paper, spread flat on a table. The room's window was laced with plants, screening the light that filtered onto her work station. Pots of brushes and rows of paint jars were set out on the table. Paintings and sketches were tacked to the soft adobe walls. This was her new working studio, smaller, more manageable than the large one where she stored her art and where her late husband had painted.

When she died of complications from cancer in 1998, she left behind a legacy of art that reaches back to New York City and the 1930s and 1940s, where she met her husband, Louis Ribak, who had already established a history of acclaim for his painting. Together they moved west to Taos, N.M., in 1944, joining an influx of artists from New York and California. These artists, including Mandelman and Ribak, Ed Corbett, Agnes Martin, Oli Sihvonen, and Clay Spohn, would become known as the "Taos Moderns."

There they stayed and worked, but with annual trips by car to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where they wintered and painted, taking a reprieve from the social structure of the closed art community of Taos. Ribak died in 1979, and Mandelman continued the ritual of painting and living in both places until she could no longer sustain the lifestyle.

Beginning this month in Taos, on July 28 and running through Sept. 8, the Fenix Gallery (505-758-9120), in conjunction with the Mandelman-Rebak Foundation, opens a show and sale of the artwork of Mandelman and Ribak. It may be the gallery presentation of the summer in Taos and Santa Fe.

Coincidentally, the Fenix Gallery is housed in an exquisite old adobe building that was the La Galeria Escondida from 1947 to 1963, a landmark gallery in the art community where Mandelman and Ribak showed their work with many of the Taos Moderns in the early years of the movement. A short walk through the parking lot at Fenix and across Ledux Street takes you to the front door of the Harwood Museum where a good collection of the Taos Moderns can be found. (Also from June 2 to Sept. 9, Richard Diebenkorn's 1950s New Mexico work will be shown, and a symposium featuring his work is scheduled for Aug. 24).

Although trappers and traders of European descent were doing business in the small adobe town in the late 1700s and early 1800s - and whooping it up in the saloons or over a private stash of Taos Lightning - the civilized, or so-called more "socially acceptable," North American world discovered Taos at the turn of the 20th century, a time when artists began to discover the town, and stay. The first group consisted of Ernest Blumenschein and Walter Ufer, Bert Phillips, Joseph Henry Sharp and Oscar Berninghouse, mostly eastern and mid-western painters who were looking for something more exotic than what they had left behind. In the clear light and wild landscape of New Mexico, and in the elegant faces of the natives at the Taos Pueblo, they found what they were looking for.

The late Earl Stroh, one of the last of the Taos Moderns and a student of Andrew Dasburg, termed that first group the "illustrators, the poster painters." The Taos Moderns were the second wave of migrating artists who consolidated in the area, following Dasburg who moved to Taos in the early 1930s at the behest of Mabel Dodge Luhan. The majority came in the post-war 1940's, including Stroh, Ribak, Mandelman, Agnes Martin, Edward Corbet and Oli Shivonen.

Whether these Taos' artists had an influence on one another is difficult to say. Yet, they shared a painting history rooted in the modern Europeans (Dasburg visited Cezanne in France) and a work ethic that stressed the development and emergence of the painting itself. Most of the painters engaged in abstract work, some worked in the figurative. In all, the extraordinary northern New Mexico landscape appeared in one shape or another.

Ribak worked with landscape and still life while his wife went to total abstraction after their early years in New York. Both had worked on Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects, Mandelman on graphics and Ribak, who had assisted Diego Rivera on the infamous Rockefeller Center wall, worked with the mural group of the WPA. There, his art was defined by Social Realism. While in New York, they were part of the emerging Abstract Expressionist movement along with friends' Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, significant artists in the movement. That crew ate, drank and lived painting, thriving in the new directions they were forging in modern art. Mandelman remained friends with Lee Krasner (Pollack's wife and fellow painter) for the rest of her life.

In Taos, Ribak set up shop teaching art, founding the Taos Valley Art School, and Mandelman traveled to Europe where for a year she studied under painter Fernand Leger. Judith Kendall, proprietor of the Fenix Gallery, worked with Mandelman from the early 1990s until her death and believes that Ribak's school was "a wonderful thing. He really contributed much to the success of other painters in the area." Ribak advanced toward abstraction, and his talent for landscapes became apparent on canvas more as elegant and colorful glimpses rather than pure representations. Mandelman's canvases danced and swirled, arabesques in bright paint of primary colors following a heavy black line. Both painters were finding a style that would come to define them.

When asked Mandelman about her association with the most famous of New Mexico painters, Georgia O'Keeffe, and whether they shared a friendship, she replied, "My dear, no one was friends with Georgia." O'Keeffe did, however, help Ribak in his career, in particular with a Guggenheim Fellowship, a boost that Mandelman graciously acknowledged.

The Mandelman-Ribak Foundation was created by Mandelman in 1997 to further the legacy of her husband's art and, upon her death, her own. Alexandra Benjamin, executive director of the foundation, says there is "an extraordinary inventory of art work" held in the Foundation. From it, she says, "Small grants are given from the proceeds of sales of the work and a gifting program is now in place for museums. But the primary objective with the Harwood Museum - that we have been working on for several years - is an expansion of their facilities."

The show will present the varied work and changing styles of the artists, including hanging paintings and artwork accessible in flat drawers. In the assortments are wonderful paper collages from Mandelman and artwork of Ribak's that show his ability as both classic draftsman and painter of abstractions. Igniting the gallery's adobe walls are a series of Mandelman's paintings, titled Celebration, Jazz, Brazil and Carnival. Mandelman expanded the physical reach of her vision by working with two-and three-paneled canvases - diptychs and triptychs, respectively - which she saw as allowing room for the colors to set a rhythm across space.

The Taos Moderns, a diverse group of people with individual styles, broke new ground for painting in America. That they all appeared at the same time and place in a small town in northern New Mexico is bewildering, a rare occurrence in the history of our times. All fiercely individualistic with a clear vision of their own art, the Taos Moderns shared both roots and purpose, manifested in the expression of the ethic that can be viewed in the work of Mandelman and Ribak.

In writing, Mandelman expressed it simply, "Paint life, not theory of life."

Writer Pete Warzel is a frequent contributor to literary magazines.