BERLIN.- Jeanne Mammen (1890-1976), painter and illustrator, is one of the most colourful characters in recent German art history, and yet one of the hardest to unravel. This Berlin artist epitomises a rare type – strong, independent women at the outbreak of Modernism. Mammen experienced war, destruction, poverty and the rise from ruins in her own very personal and productive way. By staging one of the biggest Mammen retrospectives to date, the Berlinische Galerie has initiated a rediscovery of her iconic works from the 1920s, her “degenerate” experiments and her magically poetic abstractions.

Jeanne Mammen’s œuvre, with all its fierce fault lines, depicts the political and aesthetic upheavals of the last century in works which are entertaining and at the same time critical commentaries. Art scholars far beyond the confines of Berlin and Germany have long valued Mammen, but she is hardly known to a broader audience. There may be several reasons for that. For one thing, Mammen’s work is not easily reduced to a common denominator. For another, popular access has never been easy because of her own discretion, silence and modesty, the lack of diaries, copious correspondence or public appearances, and the absence of life companions or offspring. Jeanne Mammen’s significance to 20th-century art remains underrated.

Berlin’s museum of modern art, photography and architecture is seeking to change that. The show includes about 170 works from over 60 years of output. Some 50 paintings create a particular focus among the watercolours, drawings, illustrations, caricatures, cinema posters and sculptures. The exhibition is framed by contemporary documents such as photographs, magazines, films, letters and books – conceived and curated by Mammen expert Dr Annelie Lütgens, who heads the Collection of Prints and Drawings at the Berlinische Galerie.

Tempestuous times: the biographical markers
Jeanne Mammen was born in Berlin in 1890 into a wealthy family of entrepreneurs. In 1901 the family moved for business reasons to Paris, where she enjoyed a carefree childhood with her three siblings and attended the progressive Lycée Molière. At the age of 16, Mammen began an artistic training at the city’s Académie Julian, followed by study trips to Brussels and Rome. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Mammen experienced a severe blow to her existence: Germans living in France had their possessions confiscated and were expelled from the country. Destitute, Mammen returned to her original home and started again from scratch. This was the first time she proved her ability to defy adversity. From around 1925, after a period of great deprivation, Mammen’s talent and versatility resulted in artistic success and prosperity. 1933 brought the second existential disaster in Jeanne Mammen’s life: Nazi rule and world war put an end to her career, forced her into retreat and plunged her into deep financial distress. This period of poverty and deprivation in Berlin did not paralyse her output in the slightest. In 1945 the artist returned to the public view. Jeanne Mammen died on 22 April 1976. To preserve her studio home in Berlin and her artistic estate, close friends founded the “Jeanne Mammen Society”, which lives on today in the non-profit “Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung”.

The “‘Golden” Twenties
Jeanne Mammen was not so much an inventor as a chameleon, always soaking up different currents in art and developing them in her very own way. In her younger French years, Mammen adopted the rich effects of Symbolism and Aestheticism. In Berlin she catered successfully to a booming market in newspapers and magazines under the Weimar Republic with her elegant fashion illustrations and her witty caricatures, her drawings and watercolours of urban scenes, and her portraits in the style of New Objectivity and later of blunt Realism. There was no milieu and no experience from which Mammen shied away. She was on a veritable quest for encounters, be they with urban frivolity or abject poverty, with glamorous celebrities or figures on the margins of society. She often turned a creative spotlight onto what was then the revolutionary prototype of the independent “New Woman”. In 1929 Kurt Tucholsky wrote an enthusiastic “love letter” to her work. The gallery owner Gurlitt staged her first solo exhibition in 1930. During those 15 years of Germany’s first democracy, Jeanne Mammen made a powerful contribution to the iconography of the 1920s and of a city torn between the poles of zestful living, luxury, inflation and world depression.

Age of resistance: isolation, experiment and abstraction
Jeanne Mammen survived the years of dictatorship from 1933 to 1945 by leading a reclusive and modest life with the help of friends and mini-commissions. Although she had the opportunity to seek refuge and exile abroad, she did not want to start afresh for a second time in a foreign country, and so she carried on living in her Berlin studio. She did visit the International Exposition in Paris in 1937, where she came across Picasso’s C bis opus magnum Guernica. It made a game-changing impression on Mammen, who recognised the potential to derive “degenerate” Cubist art from her contempt for the Nazis’ violent rule. This unleashed an initially covert phase of Futurist abstraction, and her experiments with new imagery expressed her inner resistance while fortifying her endurance.

Jeanne Mammen continued on this path when Germany was liberated by the Allies in 1945. After her experimental stage sets for the post-war cabaret Die Badewanne and a brief return to illustrating for the press, she devoted the next 30 years of her life exclusively to painting. Ripening age, numerous aesthetic assays, bitter personal experience and isolation strengthened her hand as she abandoned realistic depictions of pithy urban types. Her paintings were mostly devoted instead to masks and puppets, shapes, symbols and riddles. What remained throughout these different stylistic periods were the colourful restraint and tart undercurrent, the only consistent threads in the patchwork of her lifetime œuvre.

Jeanne Mammen’s work testifies to an age of extremes
Deep inside, Jeanne Mammen was always true to herself. She never signed up to any of the numerous, innovative, male-dominated art movements of the early Modernist era from Dadaism to Surrealism. She consistently rejected monopolisation by any ideology, avoiding groups and rallies. As a loner and a sharp observer, Mammen evolved into a strong, unique personality with a clear message: distance draws us in. Jeanne Mammen’s art has retained its distinctive flavour until this day, and it bears important testimony to an age of extremes. It more than deserves to be discovered, closely contemplated and widely disseminated.