To Be Just a Pair of Eyes
The other side of Jeanne Mammen
She
is regarded as “the” chronicler of 1920s Berlin, but now a heretofore
lesser known side of the painter Jeanne Mammen is being discovered. As
part of the large-scale exhibition project “Painting Forever!,” which
will open during the Berlin Art Week, four of the city’s major
exhibition venues will be celebrating the art of painting. For the
first time the Berlinische Galerie, Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, KW
Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Nationalgalerie will join
forces in this unique cooperation. On view at the KunstHalle will be
“To Paint Is To Love Again,”
featuring Jeanne Mammen’s late abstract work, still incredibly fresh
today. It will be shown alongside works by three contemporary Berlin
painters: Antje Majewski, Katrin Plavčak, and Giovanna Sarti. On the occasion of the exhibition Annelie Lütgens introduces Jeanne Mammen and her work.
Jeanne Mammen in her studio, Berlin 1975. Photo Benedikt Kuby
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Jeanne Mammen, Mackensen, undated (ca 1939 – 1942), Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung, Berlin. © Jeanne Mammen / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013, photo Angelika Weidling
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Jeanne Mammen, Sie repräsentiert (Faschingsszene), undated (ca 1928). Private collection, Berlin. © Jeanne Mammen / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013. Photo Archiv Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
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Jeanne Mammen, ca 1926. Photo Archiv Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
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Jeanne Mammen, Selbstbildnis (Self-Portrait), undated (ca 1926). Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e. V. © Jeanne Mammen / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013, photo Mathias Schormann
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Jeanne Mammen, Der heilige Antonius und die Königin von Saba, undated (ca 1910 – 1914), Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung, Berlin. © Jeanne Mammen / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013. Photo Archiv Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
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Jeanne Mammen, Photogene Monarchen, undated(ca 1967), Max-Delbrück-Centrum, Berlin. © Jeanne Mammen / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2013. Photo Archiv Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
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The
garçonne provocatively looks us straight in the eye—top hat on her
head, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, a young woman in
tow. She Represents is the title under which this watercolor by
Jeanne Mammen is published in Simplicissimus
in 1928. This androgynous heroine does indeed seem to represent a “new
type of woman”—so much so that this picture is often used to illustrate
the “decadent Berlin” of the Weimar years. Watercolors and drawings
like this one, published in Simplicissimus, Jugend, or Ulk,
bring Mammen fame as a chronicler of Berlin city life. “Gracious yet
austere” is how Kurt Tucholsky describes her female figures in 1930.
Mammen’s illustrations owe their success not least of all to the fact
that her divas and cabaret girls find favor with both men and women.
But
her legacy is much greater than that. Her paintings and drawings span
the course of seventy years and their discontinuities reflect the
upheavals that shook the twentieth century. Mammen is often summarily
described as an “artist of the twenties,” yet she vehemently resists
being pigeonholed. In 1975, she tells the art historian Hans Kinkel,
who conducts the only interview she will ever give: “You must always
write that my pictures were created between 1890 and 1975. …I have
always wanted to be just a pair of eyes, walking through the world
unseen, only to see others. Unfortunately one was seen.” Exclusion and
self-denial are the drawbacks of an artist’s existence that consciously
takes being unnoticed for granted. Asked to submit her biography on the
occasion of a 1974 exhibition, Mammen delivers a “brief report on
external details,” sketching a life story marked by fragmentation and
loss. The largest caesura is surely the Third Reich. Laconically, she notes: “With the advent of the Hitler era, a ban on, or ‘Gleichschaltung’
of, all the magazines I was working for. The end of my ‘realistic’
period. Transition to an aggressive painting style, of fragmenting the
object (in contrast to the official art world). World War II: no oil
paints, no canvas—all pictures from this period are painted with
gouache on cardboard. Ration cards, unemployment registration, hard
labor, bombing, forced training as a fireman.”
Until 1914, all roads
are open for the artistically gifted merchant’s daughter. Born in
Berlin in 1890, she moves to Paris with her family in 1895, where she
grows up and is educated in French language and culture. Her strong
affinity for French literature, for Victor Hugo and especially Gustave Flaubert,
as well as the Symbolist art of the fin de siècle, leads her to
continue the art studies she has begun in Paris, in Brussels at the
Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, in 1908. There she is able to pursue
her interests in social issues, as well as in the world of dreams. Her
first major work, twelve illustrations for the Temptation of St. Anthony,
circa 1910, has elements of the fantastical, while her sketchbooks from
that time are filled with observations of everyday life on the
boulevards of Paris, Brussels, and Berlin. With the start of World War
I Mammen and her family flee France, initially traveling to the
Netherlands. Her father, the merchant Gustav Oskar Mammen, is labelled
a foreign enemy and all of the family's possessions are confiscated.
In
1916, the Mammen family returns to Berlin, penniless. Consequently,
Jeanne and her sisters have to earn their own livelihood. While the November Revolution
rages in Berlin in 1918/19, and artists join ranks to demand a new art
for a new society, Mammen is busy just trying to get by. In 1920 she
and her sister move into a studio apartment at Kurfürstendamm 29,
which, over the coming decades, mutates into Mammen’s secluded abode.
The artist’s cosmopolitan background serves her well as she explores
the lighter and darker sides of Berlin life in her drawings. Whether
she is out exploring high-class society, the demimonde, or proletarian
bars, she is able to work confidently and unobtrusively, capturing
people and situations with her pencil in order to transform them into
multi-figured painted scenes back at her studio. Stylistically, she
draws on her French and Belgian roots, and brings a touch of Toulouse-Lautrec to the sober Berlin style.
In
1933 Mammen is rent from her secure financial and artistic basis for
the second time in her life. Deprived of her earning potential, she
registers as an unemployed commercial artist. Her hatred of the Nazi
regime prompts her to experiment with abstraction, disparaged by the
new rulers as “degenerate.”
Realism, discredited through Fascist abuse, loses its persuasive power
for her. While Mammen still produces likenesses of her contemporaries
in the sheltered atmosphere of an evening art course in life drawing,
she begins deconstructing the forms of the objects she depicts in her
paintings. The vehemence with which Mammen now “catches up with”
abstraction is tantamount to a self-destructive rejection of everything
that constitutes her artistic identity. Cubist/Expressionist images
such as Mackensen, from the late thirties, exploit the means of
modern painting, in this case, depicting a fierce caricature of the highly decorated World War I field marshal and Hitler partisan.
At the end of the war she writes to her longtime friend Max Delbrück,
a physicist who had emigrated to the USA: “… the ruins of Jeanne can be
found in the ruins of Berlin …” Mammen’s works from the latter half of
the forties are infused with a sense of calm coupled with melancholy.
She experiments with “waste” materials, incorporating wire, rope, and
scraps of paper into her pictures, and continues to pursue formal
abstraction. Mammen is represented in the first postwar exhibitions of
modern art in Berlin, including those at Galerie Gerd Rosen. In 1949/50
she is active in the literary cabaret Die Badewanne (The Bathtub),
together with young painter and writer colleagues, including Alexander
Camaro and Werner Heldt. For the first time, she is part of a Berlin
artists’ circle. However, after 1950, she withdraws from the art world
altogether—primarily due to her weariness of the intense ideological
debates that spring up around modern art. Debates that echo the
dimensions of the Cold War after 1948 in divided Berlin. This
atmosphere likely reinforces the strongly introverted character of
Mammen’s late work. Living in solitude for such a long time makes one
more sensitive to the identity of objects. They become life companions,
be they plants, animals, oddly shaped rocks, stranded objects, masks,
or dolls. In the mid-sixties figures begin to reappear in Mammen’s
paintings. Their bizarre forms and frontality are reminiscent not only
of mosaics and wall friezes, but also of marionettes in the shallow
space of a stage. The artist also reinforces the mosaic and
folkloristic character of her images by incorporating colored tinfoil
and candy wrappers into the picture surface. In them, intricate
labyrinthine structures gradually develop into a shrill puppet theater
that can sometimes contain a critique of contemporary events, such as
in the large-format painting Photogenic Monarchs, which alludes to
the Shah of Iran’s visit to Berlin in 1967.
While these intensely
colorful compositions state their case through a noisy abundance of
form, a second group of works from the same period open up an empty,
monochrome world of silence. Cipher-like characters with either
geometric or biomorphic forms are set against a consistently
light-colored ground. In these works tinfoil is used only sparingly.
Associations with rebuses come to mind (Contemplation), or seemingly
microscopic worlds of micro-organisms (The Pierced Moon) unfurl
before the viewer’s eyes.
In this final, powerful phase of her
artistic career, between 1960 and 1975, Mammen indulges in the freedom
of a very personal stylistic pluralism, one which can perhaps only be
fully appreciated today. Now that we have lived through modernism and
postmodernism, we know that novelty in art does not necessarily mean
straightforward formal innovation, and that authenticity has nothing to
do with ingenuity. Jeanne Mammen brings things to their logical
conclusion by drawing on all she has seen and absorbed during her
lifetime. There is no more battling against the world around her, but
rather a relaxed anticipation of impending death. Now she has time to
linger over a painting, applying one layer of paint and of life on top
of another, fully aware that the past is always present, and that
everything that is lived is valid.
Painting Forever!
To Paint Is to Love Again
Jeanne Mammen – Antje Majewski, Katrin Plavčak, Giovanna Sarti
Deutsche Bank KunstHalle
18.9. – 10.11.2013
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