Jeanne Mammen / Nabis / Umkreis Pierre Bonnard / Frankreich / Belgien, ca. 1912

70cm x 50 cm.

Nabis - Gemälde.

Signatur wohl Jeanne Mammen.

Frankreich / Belgien, ca. 1912.

Jeanne Mammen was born as the last of four children in Berlin in 1890. She grew up in Paris, where her parents had moved, when she was five years old. French subsequently became her second mother tongue, and it was easy for her to absorb the rich tradition of French literature and the fine arts. Already at the age of thirteen she was an avid reader, devouring contemporary French literature, and she was particularly fascinated by such visionary texts as Flaubert's "Tentation de Saint Antoine" [The Temptation of St. Anthony], which became one of her favourite readings.

After a carefree childhood and adolescence in Paris, she began her formal education in the fine arts, together with her older sister Marie Louise, in 1906 at the world famous private Académie Julian in Paris. Both sisters continued to study painting and drawing in 1908 at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and in 1911 at the Scuola Libera Academica, Villa Medici, in Rome. Jeanne Mammen's early art work, which was exhibited in the "Salons des Indépendents" in Paris and Brussels during 1912/1913, as well as her sketchbooks dating from that period with motifs from Paris, Brussels, La Panne, Ostende and Berlin, already give evidence of both, her remarkable skill in draftsmanship and the characterization of people, as well as her feeling for composition and colouration. She was justified in claiming famous artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Steinlen and the visionary Franco-Belgian and English Symbolists as her mentors.

In 1914, the outbreak of World War I forced Jeanne Mammen to interrupt her studies. Her family managed to catch the last train from France to Holland, to escape internment. Her father, Gustav Oskar Mammen, who had been a wealthy merchant, all of a sudden had become a foreign enemy, and his property was confiscated by the French government. Consequently the young artist found herself without any financial resources, when the exodus ended in Berlin half a year later. The years during and after the war were marked by deprivation and her struggle to survive, trying to find work, and having to accept any kind of a job, in order to earn a living. The social and political upheavals, while forcing her into a social and economic situation, she had not experienced before, also brought her close to different types of people, making her very responsive and sensitive to their existential problems. These first-hand experiences literally went under her skin, and found an intense expression in her art work. (E. Roters).

After having lived in Berlin with her parents, in 1919 Jeanne Mammen and her sister Marie Louise moved into a former photographic studio at Kurfürstendamm 29. Marie Louise, who also painted (she signed her paintings "M. L. Mammen", her illustrations "M. L. Folcardy") lived with her for some time until she left for Persia. In the 1920s the Kurfürstendamm was the main broadway of Berlin, and the studio was located in a large apartment building, the front facing the busy street, the back, however, overlooking the courtyard with trees and birds singing. Jeanne Mammen called this green oasis in the heart of the city her garden, and it was to become her residence (Wohnatelier) for 57 years, until her death in 1976.

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