MIRELL & VILDA'S STORY

With their bold expressiveness in form and color the works of the Beckmanns embody an adamant optimism in the artists’ ability to recreate the world around them on their own terms. 

TWO PATHS that had their start in the first decade of the twentieth century did not cross until 1956, when Margot Himmel, traveling to visit friends in Israel, met William Beckmann. Their journeys to that point had similarities — successes and obstacles both — blazed in turbulent times but never derailing their creative curiosity. And once met they were never far apart, their shared inspirations and discoveries binding them immediately and forever on travels in which there was never a last corner to turn, or final road to explore.

William Beckmann was born in Prague in 1909. In the twenty years before World War II, he drew political and sports cartoons for Czech periodicals, and was considered to be a leading newspaper designer and cartoonist. His first love, though, was painting, having studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He signed his work using the Czech version of his name: “Vilda.”

At the war’s onset the Nazis sent William to Theresienstadt (Czech “Terezin”), a concentration camp used as a transit point for western Jews en route to Auschwitz and other camps. Soon after his arrival, and with the camp set to expand and in need of some planning and design, the Nazis asked of a group of prisoners, “Who can draw?”  William reluctantly raised his hand — and the odds of his surviving until the camp’s eventual liberation.

Returning to Prague, he resumed his work in (often political) caricature, cartooning, and miscellaneous other pursuits until (as William succinctly put it), “In 1948 the Communists came, and I left in 1949.” Along with his son Milan, he relocated to the new State of Israel as a sports and politics cartoon designer for major Israeli newspapers.

Margot Mirell Himmel, two years older than William, was born in 1907 in Danzig (now Gdansk), Poland. Her art studies began at age six in Berlin, where she eventually earned a Masters degree at the Staatliche Kunstakademie, Koenigsburg. She had her heart set on Paris, though, and in her early twenties found work there as a painter, photographer, and journalist. Signing her work “Mirell,” she exhibited in at least five one-person shows, including at the prestigious Galerie Billiet, where her work earned excellent reviews from such esteemed critics as George Besson, Waldemar George, and Paul Westheim. 

In those pre-war years, she traveled in an Expressionist-tinted, Paris-in-the-30scircle  during the Cubism movement that included other artists of her time and place: Chaim Soutine, Bella Czóbel, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jankel Adler among others. She worked in oils, pastels, watercolors, and also Peinture sur Verre — “oil on (or under) glass.” A contemporary critic favorably compared her work in that medium with that of Chagall.

Like William, Margot was imprisoned soon after the war began. She was sent to Gurs,
a large concentration camp at the foot of the Pyrenees in southwest France. She subsequently obtained a visa with the help of a twin brother and other relatives living in America. Margot made her way south to Marseille, caught what she described as “the last boat to Casablanca,” and eventually landed in New York in the spring of 1942. Margot designed textiles and took photos. “I did everything.” But, “Painting was everything I wanted in life.” And never far from her attention.

As early as 1946, Mirell was receiving letters from the Museum of Modern Art — expressing interest in her work — and invitations from the most successful art dealers of the day to represent her to the city’s most discriminating art buyers.   

Following their first meeting in Israel in 1956, William followed Margot back to New York City, where they married a year later and moved to the Upper West Side apartment they would occupy for the next 24 years. Milan would later join them after serving in the Israeli Army. Living off their talents — and reparations from the German government — Margot and William painted, drew, photographed...and traveled. 

Optimism came naturally to them, borne of a conscious wonder not so much that
they had survived when others did not, but that they were privileged to follow the art
in their hearts…and do it together. 

They gathered influences around them like friendships, sometimes (and individually) leaning in whatever modernist direction they fancied at the time. A later critic noted the “colorful, innovative, often humorous” qualities of their work: intriguing people
they met and captured in portrait, far-away shorelines, street scenes, and still lifes
captured in tones, textures and colors that are as likely to surprise as to satisfy the observer.

Ink, watercolor, pastels, oils, collage.... Margot and William turned to whatever best captured the ocean horizon at Haifa, or a stylized private intimacy. In depictions of landscapes from their younger lives, a 1960s New York City street scene, or a shady and timeless Mediterranean café, their work displays an enduring and spontaneous enthusiasm: canvas sometimes peeks through the images, testimony to their unapologetic eagerness to snare a moment and express it in brush strokes or charcoaled curves.

Through the years, occasional exhibits overseas and in the U.S. led to their work remaining today in many private collections on both sides of the Atlantic.

For reasons of health and family, Margot and William moved to Florida’s east coast in the early 1980s. They never stopped creating, showing their work occasionally at
regional exhibits, often garnering Best in Show honors along with other praise and press coverage. 

William passed away in 1988; Margot in 1998. Together they left behind hundreds
of reflections of their lives, travels, and interests, now gathered comprehensively in
a lively exhibit of their talent, curiosity, and positivism: Mirell and Vilda:

Two in Time and Texture.