Executed in circa 1925, Zwei Mädchen (Two Girls) captures the high point of Jeanne Mammen’s neo-objective realistic work, representing her uncompromising reflection of her immediate surroundings, of a society addicted to pleasure and distraction during the Golden Twenties in Berlin. Mammen in this present work allows for the female figures to take center stage. With its fine pencil lines and light hues of grey, she gives the viewer a glimpse behind the scene of the hectic city life of Berlin, giving one a feeling of time standing still. The viewer is left guessing if the two women have had a turbulent night in one of Berlin’s establishments or are simply enjoying a quiet walk through the city.

Born in Berlin in 1890, Jeanne Mammen grew up as the daughter of a well-off and liberal minded merchant family in Paris. Enthusiastic about drawing and painting, she studied, together with her sister, painting and graphic arts in Paris, Brussels and Rome. Her artistic ambitions were always supported by her parents, however the outbreak of the First World War, brought an abrupt end to the families care free life. Expropriated, Mammen is forced to flee via the Netherlands back to Berlin, now penniless.

Even though shocked by the Prussian philistinism and Wilhelmine subservience, Mammen threw herself into the bustling life of the city. In 1920, she moved into a studio at Kurfürstendamm 29 with her sister, where she worked as a draftswoman for various journals and magazines. She would go with her pen and paper to visit shady places of the metropolitan jungle, places even her male colleagues would have avoided going to. Unlike most of her fellow artists, Jeanne Mammen can make a living from her artistic work. Thus, with her milieu depictions from the cafés and clubs, the dance and travesty establishments, the countless bars and the streets of Berlin, she becomes a photojournalist of the wild 1920s. In light brushstrokes and unmistakable colors, she immortalizes figures of light and shadow. At the same time, she sketches the image of the new woman who is not only attracted to the male sex.

Mammen had her first solo exhibition at the Galerie Gurlitt in 1930, with resounding success. However, after the National socialists had taken over only three years later, her art was branded as “degenerate”. She would only be able to exhibit publicly again in July 1945, showing her works in one of the first exhibitions in Berlin after the war. Mammen would later work for magazines again, although to a much lesser extent than in the twenties. In the late 1950s she designed stage sets and costumes for the Dadaist cabaret such as the Quallepeitsche. It was not until the 1970s, when works from the time of the Weimar Republic began to be rediscovered, that Jeanne Mammen also received renewed appreciation. She passed away in Berlin on April 22, 1976.

In 1997, the first retrospective of Jeanne Mammen’s oeuvre was held at the Martin Gropius Bau by the Berlinische Galerie and which focussed on the 1920s, marking the artists so-called resurrection in the art world. However today, almost 60 years after the artist’s passing, and as a result of the comprehensive reassessment of the contribution of female artists in art history, that the work of the Berlin artist is once again moving into the focus of museums, institutions, and the art trade. In 2008, the Paula Modersohn Becker Museum in Bremen dedicated a solo exhibition to her, followed in 2017 by a major retrospective at the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin.