“Sie repräsentiert”, 1928 Jeanne Mammen captured the women of Weimar Berlin better that anyone, observing life from the peephole of her Charlottenburg studio. See her work at the Berlinische Galerie starting October 5.
In September 1919, Jeanne Mammen moved with her sister to a fourth-floor flat at Kurfürstendamm 29 that consisted of just two small rooms – no electric light, no bath, and no telephone. “Artists do not need these things,” the landlord told her. Born to a wealthy family in Berlin, raised and educated in Paris but forced to flee to Amsterdam at the onset of WWI to escape internment, the 29-year-old painter was penniless when she returned to the city she’d left when she was only five. The war had ended in humiliating tragedy, the Republic had just been proclaimed. Mammen found a capital bursting with poverty and opportunity, swept by that whirl of post-war freedom, cynical insouciance and creative decadence that was to characterise the Weimar era, and become the inspiration of her most famous work.
Soon enough Mammen found employment designing film posters for the then booming UFA film studios and illustrating magazine covers, but her true passion laid in observing and documenting the people around her, exploring high-class society as well as the interloper crowds that populated Berlin’s infamous nightlife. In watercolour washes or pen and ink, in a style compared to Grosz with a touch of Toulouse-Lautrec, she depicted cabaret dancers and emancipated flapper girls, society ladies and short-haired women looking you straight in the face with a cigarette in their mouth or another woman in tow.
There is a deep intimacy in her nuanced portraits, a mix of “grace and guts” as admirer Kurt Tucholsky put it. Her lithographs illustrating the lesbian love poem collection
Les Chansons de Bilitis were enough for the Nazis to ban her work when they came to power – on the grounds that it was “too Jewish”. Rather than compromise, Mammen stopped exhibiting, earning money from selling used books from a handcart, but kept secretly experimenting with Expressionism and Cubism, even as the National Socialists condemned them as “degenerate”.
“Die Großstadt”, 1927. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017, Kai-Annett Becker
Although friends offered to help her flee, she always doggedly refused to leave her Ku’damm home, opting for “inner exile” instead. Here, she worked by candlelight even after her building was bombed and the neighbourhood lay in ruins, gathering wires and other debris to make relief sculptures. She would remain at the same address until the very end, leading a secluded life after she decided to retire from the art world in the 1950s, yet never giving up painting.
Her iconic 1920s work may have eclipsed her postwar career, but the Berlinische Galerie’s new retrospective shows how Mammen tirelessly experimented until her last breath. Already brought back to light in an exhibition at Berlin Art Week four years ago, Mammen’s later abstract work is shown here in its full, bizarre and very personal stylistic pluralism, ranging from cubism to the symbol-laden poetics of a Paul Klee.
She died at age 85 in 1976, still living in the same Kurfürstendamm apartment she had rented 57 years earlier. In the sole interview she ever gave, conducted a year before her death, she said, “I have always wanted to be just a pair of eyes, walking through the world unseen, only to see others.” The scope and the title of this exhibition couldn’t encapsulate her words better.
Jeanne Mammen: The Observer, Oct 6-Jan 15 | Berlinische Galerie, Kreuzberg
