Beatrice Riese, Abstract Artist And Collector, 86

[DGH]

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Beatrice Riese, an abstract painter whose important collection of
African art is now owned by the Brooklyn [New York] Museum, died on
April 2, 2004, at the hospice at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan,
New York, the cause being abdominal cancer, said Roger Mosesson, a
friend, at the age of 86.

Ms. Riese was born in The Hague, the Netherlands. In the 1930's she
studied art in Paris, where she was first introduced to African art.
In 1940, shortly before the Germans invaded France, she escaped with
her parents to Africa. From there they sailed to the United States,
settling in Richmond, Va. There, Ms. Riese married a Spanish anarchist
she had met on the voyage. She also took art classes with Clyfford
Still at Virginia Commonwealth University.

After a divorce, she moved to New York City, New York, and supported
herself and her young son by working as a textile designer. The
abstract painting and drawing style she eventually developed, with its
gridded geometric forms filled with finely worked calligraphic lines,
suggested the patterns of woven fabric and stitchwork, as well as
densely written musical notation and micrography.

In New York she studied with Will Barnet, and joined American Abstract
Artists, serving as president of the organization for more than a
decade. She was a member of A.I.R. gallery in Manhattan, the first
nonprofit artist-run New York gallery for woman, now in Chelsea.

In a long career, she had more than two dozen solo exhibitions in
museums and galleries. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of
Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum,
the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, and other
institutions.

Along with African art, which she began buying in Manhattan in the
1950's, she collected Native American art. She donated work to the
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Snite Museum of Art at Notre Dame
University, as well as to the Brooklyn Museum, which organized an
exhibition of 30 of her West and Central African marks and figural
sculptures in 2000.