2024-03-26 13:54:12
Culture Jeanne Mammens in Berlin
Where you can still feel the roaring twenties
As of: 9:38 a.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
Mammen’s “Woman’s Head, Left Eye Covered by Hair”
Source: © Griesebach GmbH
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With furious strokes, Jeanne Mammen captured the attitude to life of the Berlin bohemians. Some of her drawings are still affordable on the art market. You can only get closer to the artist, who was only rediscovered late, at Kurfürstendamm 29.
Short, powerful strokes, then clear lines that set the contours and do not tolerate any breaks; The motif that appears before our eyes shows a self-confident, life-hungry woman with frizzy hair and thoughts who would certainly have a lot to say about the wild Berlin 1920s if one were to ask her about the reasons for her smeared red lipstick.
“He who has eyes, let him see,” wrote its creator, the Berlin artist Jeanne Mammen, in 1947 to her close friend, the Nobel Prize winner and biophysicist Max Delbrück, who ensured that her work was for a long time much better known in the United States of America in Germany. It was only in 1971, on her 80th birthday, that she was rediscovered and honored by Berlin. But by then she was old and annoyed by all the late arrivals who had long forgotten and ostracized her in her “bude” in Charlottenburg.
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At the entrance to the house at Kurfürstendamm 29, a memorial plaque made of KPM porcelain tells the story of who lived there in the “Garden House” from 1920 – together with her sister, who later went to Tehran with her life partner – until her death in 1976. The rental agreement is still in Mammen’s name today, and the rent has hardly changed. Even back then, the Ku’damm was an expensive neighborhood.
But she didn’t have her closest friends, family and children, after her death they really left everything as it was, even kept the traditions, met on her sofa on the same day of the week, smoked and drank – and celebrated in between all the art , which she had hoarded for decades, simply continued – until at some point all her contemporaries died and demand and prices rose.
You can visit the apartment, the art historian Martina Weinland offers tours of the city museum – or rather asks the guests to take a seat on the original sofa in the manageable studio with the large window front and the balcony, which served as Mammen’s refrigerator. No technical devices came into her house.
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She didn’t want a bath. There was a toilet in the hallway. The living room table could be converted into a dining table when friends came over. Only her papier-mâché sculptures have not survived – the art, created in her poverty using the simplest materials, has since been recast in bronze.
One of these good friends was Hans Laabs (1915 to 2004). The “Woman’s Head” once belonged to him, which has now been auctioned at the Berlin auction house Grisebach for 4,318 euros. The painter was part of the “Badewannen” group, an experimental theater group in the former “Femina” bar on Nürnberger Straße. For Mammen, those years around 1949 were formative after all the torment of war; especially because those same friends stayed with her throughout her life and ensured that we can still visit Jeanne Mammen today.
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In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is necessary, as the providers of the embedded content require this consent as third party providers [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (revocable at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can revoke your consent at any time using the switch and privacy at the bottom of the page.
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