Jeanne Mammen

Jeanne Mammen was born in Berlin, the daughter of a successful German merchant. She and her family moved to Paris when she was five years old.[3] She started her studies at Académie Julian, one of few art schools at the time that taught women with the same rigor as men. When her family relocated to Brussels, she studied at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1908.[4] Her early work, influenced by Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and the Decadent movement, was exhibited in Brussels and Paris in 1912 and 1913.[5]

In 1916 Mammen and her family fled Paris to avoid internment during World War I.[6] While her parents moved to Amsterdam, Mammen chose instead to return to Berlin. She was now financially on her own for the first time, as the French government had confiscated all of her family's property. For several years Mammen struggled to make ends meet, taking any work she could find, and spending time with people from different class backgrounds. These experiences and newfound sympathies are reflected in her artwork from the period.[7]

In time Mammen was able to find work as a commercial artist, producing fashion plates, movie posters, and caricatures for satirical journals such as Simplicissimus, Ulk,[5] and Jugend.[8] In the mid-1920s she became known for her illustrations evoking the urban atmosphere of Berlin. Much of her artwork depicted women. These women subjects often included haughty socialites, fashionable middle-class shop girls, street singers, and prostitutes.[9] Her drawings were often compared to those of George Grosz and Otto Dix.[10] Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s she worked mainly in pencil with watercolor washes, and in pen and ink.[8]

In 1921, Mammen moved into an apartment with her sister in Berlin. This apartment was a former photographer's studio which she lived in until her death. Aside from art throughout her life Mammen also was interested in science. She was close friends with Max Delbrück who left Europe and took some of her artwork with him and exhibited them in California. In addition to bringing these art works to be exhibited he also sent Mammen care packages from the United States with art supplies.[11]

In 1930 she had a major exhibition in the Fritz Gurlitt gallery.[12] Over the next two years, at Gurlitt's suggestion, she created a series of eight lithographs illustrating Les Chansons de Bilitis, a collection of lesbian love poems by Pierre Louÿs.[12]

In 1933, following Mammen's inclusion in an exhibition of female artists in Berlin, the Nazi authorities denounced her motifs and subjects as "Jewish", and banned her lithographs for Les Chansons de Bilitis.[12] The Nazis also opposed her blatant disregard for 'appropriate' female submissiveness in the expressions of her subjects as well as the lesbian imagery found in many of her works.[13] The Nazis shut down most of the journals she had worked for,[14] and she refused to work for those that complied with their cultural policies.[12]

Until the end of the war she practiced "inner emigration". She stopped exhibiting her work and focused on advertising. For a time she also peddled second-hand books from a handcart.[14] In the 1940s, in a show of solidarity, Mammen began experimenting with Cubism and expressionism, a risky move given the Nazis' condemnation of abstract art as "degenerate". During this, Mammen, an avid reader of modernist literature, also started her translation of Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations.[15]

After the war she took to collecting wires, string, and other materials from the streets of bombed-out Berlin to create reliefs. In the late 1940s she began exhibiting her work again, as well as designing sets for the Die Badewanne cabaret. She created abstract collages from various materials, including candy wrappers. In the 1950s she adopted a new style, combining thick layers of oil paint with a few fine marks on the surface.[16]

In the 1970s there was a resurgence of interest in Mammen's early work as German art historians and art historians of the women's movement rediscovered her paintings and illustrations from the Weimar period.[22] In 2010 the Des Moines Art Center exhibited 13 watercolor paintings done by Mammen which were inspired by Berlin in the Weimer era.[23] In 2013 her later, more abstract work, was featured in "Painting Forever!", a large-scale exhibition held during Berlin Art Week.[24]

Memorial plaque at Mammen's studio apartment

The Berlinische Galerie mounted a major exhibition of Mammen's work in 2017-2018, titled, "Jeanne Mammen: Die Beobachterin: Retrospektive 1910–1975" (Jeanne Mammen: The Observer: Retrospective 1910–1975), which included more than 170 works in various media, covering the period from the 1920s to her later work post-1960s. The show was an update to the Galerie's 1997 show at the Martin Gropius Bau, which featured primarily works from the 1920s.[25]

The Jeanne Mammen Foundation created a museum of Jeanne's studio apartment at Kurfürstendamm 29, which she lived and worked in for over 50 years.[11] Since the foundation's dissolution in 2018, the Stadtmuseum Berlin runs the museum.[11]