Jeanne Mammen by Camilla Smith

Author:Camilla Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350239401
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

It is unclear whether these tensions related to the poster or, more fundamentally, as Zimmermann’s comment suggests, the exhibition of Mammen’s work per se. Mammen was the only artist to have had a successful career before the war and she was older and more experienced. But she was also the only woman artist. Whatever ‘problem’ existed seemed, nonetheless, not to go unnoted by Mammen, whose émigré friends Kurt Wohl and Max Delbrück in their letter exchange in 1952 described what happened as simply a ‘boycott’ against her.90

Although Grohman’s appraisal of the exhibition sought to find affinities between the artists, his review also betrayed a gendered subtext. It was ultimately the works of Uhlmann, Hartung, Trökes and Zimmermann that were praised for their international recognition.91 Other remarks condescendingly singled Mammen out as a woman artist: ‘[she] takes everything very seriously and only rarely ventures into the realm of the femininely decorative and playful.’92 And in a later newspaper article about the same exhibition, he claimed that her work overcompensated for her ‘sensitivity and fear’.93 Comments in other Grohmann articles about Berlin’s art scene reveal a similar gender bias:

The hero of the day is Werner Heldt [Der Held des Tages]. There are works from the older, earlier [Karl] Hofer and [Karl] Schmidt-Rotluff. This time completely different influences become apparent, from the abstractionists and the Surrealists and the French and the imaginative Germans [the Berlin Surrealists]. For women the work of Paula Modersohn-Becker has been revived.94

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