Jeanne Mammen

Jeanne Mammen (21 November 1890 – 22 April 1976) was a German painter, illustrator, and printmaker. Her work is associated with the New Objectivity, Symbolism, and Cubism movements. She is best known for her depictions of queer women and Berlin city life during the Weimar period.

Biography

Early life 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. 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. Her early work, influenced by Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and the Decadent movement, was exhibited in Brussels and Paris in 1912 and 1913.

In 1916 Mammen and her family fled Paris to avoid internment during World War I. 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.

Weimar Period

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, 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. Her drawings were often compared to those of George Grosz and Otto Dix. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s she worked mainly in pencil with watercolor washes, and in pen and ink. The Nazis shut down most of the journals she had worked for, and she refused to work for those that complied with their cultural policies.

Postwar and later years 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.

Style and methods

She worked in a variety of mediums, including watercolor, oil, lithography, and sculpture but is most known for her Weimar period (1919–33) works in watercolor and graphite. Her style during this time was characterized by "a simplified, elegant line with a wash of color added later [which] made her popular among high-circulation magazines and journals".

During this time, she was a part of the New Objectivity movement, in which artists attempted to reconcile with a post-WWI Germany by looking at societal issues with "meticulous detail and violent satire". Under the Nazi regime, she experimented in secret with Cubism and Expressionism to rebel against the government's banning of "degenerate" art.

Themes

Mammen's works focused largely on female subjects and female relationships, both platonic and romantic. Many of her female subjects displayed characteristics of the "New Woman of 1920's Berlin - fashionable, independent, and relatively sexually liberated. In her Weimar period illustrations and watercolors, she "addressed the changing roles of women. From the vamp, the naive and young, to the bourgeois and the intellectual, she depicted the complexities of being a New Woman struggling with emerging roles." Her contributions depicted prostitutes, women-only nightclubs, and bars of the city. In 2010 the Des Moines Art Center exhibited 13 watercolor paintings done by Mammen which were inspired by Berlin in the Weimar era. In 2013 her later, more abstract work, was featured in "Painting Forever!", a large-scale exhibition held during Berlin Art Week.

Foundation and Jeanne Mammen Apartment Museum 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. Since the foundation's dissolution in 2018, the Stadtmuseum Berlin runs the museum.