Alongside Hanna Höch and Käthe Kollwitz, Jeanne Mammen is one of the most important female artists of the 20th century. As an incorruptible chronicler of the Weimar Republic, she recorded what she saw without ideological judgement - and in this way created a fascinating and precise testimony to a long-since vanished era.
(...) Continue readingJeanne Mammen - Artistic training in Paris, Brussels and Rome
Jeanne Mammen was born in Berlin on 21st November 1890, the daughter of the merchant Gustav Oskar Mammen. She grew up in Paris, where she attended the Lycée Molière and studied painting at the Académie Julian from 1906. She continued her studies at the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1908 and at the Scuola Libera Academia in Rome in 1911. Her early work consisted mainly of symbolist watercolours, for which she used literary models such as The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert. In 1913 and 1914, she visited the Parisian dance palace Bal Bullier and painted the women who frequented it. Mammen's happy years came to an end when she and her family had to flee to Berlin to escape imminent internment at the outbreak of the First World War. Her father's assets had been confiscated by the French state leaving them completely destitute. In her new homeland, Jeanne Mammen initially earned her living as a fashion illustrator, which was particularly difficult for her at the beginning due to her poor knowledge of the German language. The war years were marked by misery and a constant struggle for survival, but she finally won.
Great success in the Berlin ‘Roaring Twenties’
In 1919, together with her older sister Marie Luise Mammen, known as Mimi, she was able to move into a studio on Kurfürstendamm, which she would not leave until the end of her life. The 1920s brought Jeanne Mammen artistic and commercial success: a great number of her pictures appeared in renowned magazines, she was able to organise her first solo exhibition at the Gurlitt Gallery, and became lasting friends with the engineer and sculptor Hans Uhlmann. In 1932, during a trip to Moscow, she showed sympathy for socialism. She collected her motifs through keen observation on the street, and her pointed caricatures and trenchant depictions even earned her the praise of the great satirist Kurt Tucholsky. At the height of her artistic career, it was another world war that changed everything for Mammen and brought her familiar world crashing down.
Internal escape during the Nazi regime
When the National Socialists seized power, Jeanne Mammen was once again left with nothing: the magazines in which she could publish her pictures were banned overnight, and she herself had to live a charade to avoid being banned from her profession as a degenerate artist. She disguised herself as a commercial artist and officially painted what the new rulers wanted to see. In reality, however, she escaped by painting behind hidden doors, in contradiction to the brown zeitgeist. After the war, Mammen worked as a translator and painted abstract works, but was unable to repeat the success of her Weimar period.
Late rediscovery and appreciation
Jeanne Mammen died on 22nd April 1976 in her native city of Berlin following a serious illness. Today there is a memorial plaque on the building that once housed her studio, commemorating an unusual artist and her work. She was not always afforded this appreciation: In the years before her death, she had been temporarily forgotten, no doubt also due to the difficult period of the Nazi dictatorship. It was not until 1971 that her works were shown again in exhibitions in Hamburg and Stuttgart, and in the 1990s the art world was gripped by a veritable Mammen wave. Today, the Berlin artist is a household name, not only among critics and collectors, and works by Jeanne Mammen fetch respectable prices.
Jeanne Mammen - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
