Introduction
Rose Mandel (August 2, 1910 – March 12, 2002) was a Polish-born American photographer, who was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967.
Early life
Rose Mandel was born in a Jewish family in Czaniec, Poland. She studied child psychology with Jean Piaget in Geneva, at the Rousseau Institute. She lived in Paris in the 1930s. In 1942, during World War II, she and her husband Arthur left Europe for America. She studied photography at the California School of Fine Arts, with Ansel Adams and Minor White as instructors. One of her classmates, who became a close friend, was Richard Diebenkorn.
Career
Mandel was senior photographer for the art department at the University of California. Her 1948 show, "On Walls and Behind Glass", at the San Francisco Museum of Art, focused on street photography. In 1954, she had a solo exhibit at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, titled "The Errand of the Eye," after an Emily Dickinson poem. The photographs in this show were mostly nature subjects in closeup. In 1956, photographs by Rose Mandel accompanied an ArtNews profile of Richard Diebenkorn. "I never tried to imitate painting," Mandel explained late in life. "I wanted to be very photographic, 100 percent photographic." Her work was recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967.
Personal life
Rose Mandel died in Berkeley, California in 2002, age 91.
In 2013, a retrospective titled "The Errand of the Eye: Photographs by Rose Mandel," featuring 80 of her works, was organized by the de Young Museum in San Francisco, California.