Beatrice Mandelman, NO War #1
Beatrice Mandelman
1921 Newark, New Jersey - 1998 Taos, New Mexico
NO War #1
ca. 1965
photographs, collage, and acrylic on board
21 ¼ x 15 ½ in.
New Mexico Museum of Art, gift of the Beatrice Mandelman Ribak Estate, 2003, 2003.3.9, © 2020 Mandelman-Ribak Foundation
photo by Blair Clark
“Collage," Beatrice Mandelman once said, "best represents my concern for the stressful, shifting, transitory nature of human experience." Mandelman’s No War #1 combines materials cut from magazines with acrylic paint to overtly express her opinions about Vietnam. The hard lines and overlay of geometric shapes with text and imagery suggest the complex and disjunct feelings brought about by war.
There have been thousands of tests of nuclear weapons, but they have only been used twice in warfare; in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though nuclear bombs have not been dropped on humans since 1945, the threat of their use in war cannot be completely eliminated. A document from the CIA in 1966 (released to the public in 2005) reveals that the U.S. considered using nuclear bombs in the Vietnam War.