November 21, 1890

The significance of the artist Jeanne Mammen (November 21. 1890 to April 22, 1976) ) is summarized by a German gallery:

'The artist Jeanne Mammen ... gained a reputation beyond Berlin as a chronicler of life in the city during the 1920s. Her watercolours and drawings made a distinctive contribution to urban art in that glittering decade with its forceful social contrasts. But Jeanne Mammen left far more to posterity than this: her œuvre of seventy years, paintings and drawings with discontinuities that graphically express the political and artistic upheavals of the 20th century.

'In 1997, the Berlinische Galerie mounted its first major exhibition dedicated to this artist. The venue was the Martin Gropius Bau, and the focus was on the 1920s. The current retrospective highlights the painter Jeanne Mammen and revisits her overall output. It presents oils and watercolours from the late 1920s, major works of Cubo-Futurism painted during the Nazi years, and notably the years after 1960. Drawings, illustrations, fashion and stage designs complement the paintings. The aim is to convey the dialectical interplay between the life and the work of an artist who cannot be pinned down to any particular style, be it Expressionism, Cubism or New Objectivity. This is the first exhibition to demonstrate how her early exposure to 19th-century French art and literature remained an influence in Mammen’s work until the end.'

MoMA elaborates; Mammen was a --

'Watercolorist, painter, printmaker. Raised in Paris. Studied art in Paris, Brussels, and Rome from 1906 until 1911. As a German citizen, was forced to flee France with her family at outbreak of World War I; lost all possessions. Impoverished, settled in Berlin in 1916, where she eventually earned a living making illustrations for fashion magazines and posters for Universum-Film AG (UFA), the film distributor.

'After 1924 frequently published drawings and watercolors in major satirical periodicals such as Ulk and Simplicissimus, for which she chronicled the experiences of Berlin's crop-haired, self-reliant "new women" at work and leisure — experiences that mirrored her own. Often showed them in cramped, distorted spaces, some rendered in lurid tones reminiscent of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and others in brilliant, orphic colors of the prewar Parisian avant-garde. Enjoyed growing commercial and critical success; in 1930 had first solo exhibition at Galerie Gurlitt in Berlin. At publisher Wolfgang Gurlitt's behest, made lithographs illustrating a book of erotic Sapphic poetry, Les Chansons de Bilitis, in 1931–32, which was banned by the Nazis.

'Under Nazi dictatorship, remained in Germany but lived in a state of "inner emigration"; refused to exhibit or publish. Turned increasingly to painting in Cubist and Expressionist styles out of solidarity with artists who Nazis defamed as degenerate.'

Mammen portrayed cats too. Of course we have to present a thumbnail version.



Quite lovely: "Lady with a Cat."