The Women of Secession: Jeanne Mammen
She Represents, c. 1928, (‘Sie Repräsentiert‘)
watercolour and pencil on paper
42 x 30.4 cm
private collection

Jeanne Mammen, a German artist, once said she wanted to observe the world unseen. Born on November 21, 1890, in Berlin, she moved to Paris with her family soon after. Her father was a successful businessman, and their comfortable life gave her early access to art and literature. She admired French writers like Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert and began studying at the Académie Julian in 1906. By 1908, she was in Brussels, then spent time between Paris, Brussels, Rome, and Amsterdam. In 1912, she exhibited with the Indépendents in Brussels, influenced by Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and the Decadence Movement.

World War I changed everything. Her family lost their property in France, and Mammen returned to Berlin, now living in poverty. But this marked the beginning of her most creative period. In the early 1920s, she began illustrating film posters and magazines. Her drawings captured the energy and excess of interwar Germany, mixing the sharp social critique of Otto Dix and George Grosz with the warmth of Toulouse-Lautrec and her own feminine viewpoint. Unlike many male artists of the time, she showed women as real people—strong, independent, and often in close relationships with other women. Her time in Berlin’s lesbian bars led to speculation about her own sexuality, though she never spoke publicly about it.

Her 1928 work She Represents shows an androgynous woman at a lively party in a lesbian bar, blending French and German styles. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Mammen refused to follow their rules. She stopped showing her work in public and turned to abstract art, inspired by Picasso’s Guernica. Her studio on Kurfürstendamm became a quiet place of resistance, where she kept working in private despite the risks.

After World War II, she began experimenting with sculpture made from scrap materials and created collages influenced by Miró and Pollock. From 1960 to 1975, she kept exploring new ideas, often using mystical symbols and the color white. Her techniques—layering, fragmentation, and reuse—reflected the broken world she lived in.

Though not widely known during her lifetime, Mammen offered a rare and honest view of war, gender, and sexuality. Her work responded to many sides of human experience, always with care and insight. In the early 1970s, art historians began to take notice, especially those interested in feminist and queer perspectives. She died in 1975, just as her legacy was starting to be understood.