Flashback to the eighties.

"Punk" roars from several pages at once, the neckless Hugo with the shaved half-Iroquois stares in front of him from left to right, into nothingness.

"Punk Tuck" is the name of the portrait from 1984 surrounded by a hidden object drawing. Berlin subculture, Turkish flag, pornography with Hebrew writing, a collection of symbols, text, image details form an overabundance in the lower third of the paper that overwhelms you when you look at it get your wallet stolen at a red light.

Eva Maria Magel

Senior cultural editor of the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

  • Follow I follow

Almost all of the drawings by Stéphane Mandelbaum (1961–1986) look like muggings, his portraits are extremely large for pencil or felt-tip pen drawings.

P. de Max (1984), for example, who can also be seen on the exhibition poster, greets visitors in the tower annex of the Museum für Moderne Kunst with a fixed gaze and a drooping corner of the mouth – a huge portrait, the nose crooked, one eye covered by a strand of hair, but one suspects, as with the image of Meknil right next to it, that there might not be a second eye at all.

And like Mandelbaum's self-portraits, almost all of those portrayed have strangely knobby, broad noses, as if they, including the women, often prostitutes, had been in the boxing ring.

The painter who steals paintings

Broken noses, broken biographies, that's roughly how it looks in the universe of Mandelbaum, who is now only being shown in an exhibition for the third time since his untimely death.

His works are scattered, the museum has asked almost 50 lenders for about twice as many works.

From the sheets, which basically always show or contain portraits, mostly of real or historical people, even in the small-scale swarm, a puzzle emerges of what and how this young artist could have been, whose works also reflect the spirit of the time and the artists mirrors that not only fascinated him at the time.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rimbaud, portrayed several times, were also the gods of others who lived in the early 1980s in the subculture, half-world, visual arts, danger, and porn.

Many of them died early, including Stéphane Mandelbaum.

But he wasn't from an overdose, AIDS or alcohol - he was murdered.

Presumably from the client of an art theft.

Not the only one committed by Mandelbaum, whose life ended at 25.

The painter who steals paintings is one of the many twists in Mandelbaum's life.

As the child of two artists - Arié Mandelbaum, the father, was even his teacher at the art academy for a time, the mother Pili Mandelbaum was an illustrator - he developed an extraordinary talent early on.

At the same time, he was dyslexic and had to laboriously explore the world of letters – they appear all the more extensively in his works, as text, as ornament, as text ornament.


The father's Jewish origins, the Holocaust, and National Socialism characterize the world of images, and Mandelbaum combines Nazi greats with violent excesses and pornographic depictions almost in series.

This is often hard to bear, obsessive, in a crude mixture of masterfully drawn and rather scribbled - whereby biographical and contemporary historical references are revealed in small-scale scribbles.

In this respect, too, the almond tree, well versed in the art world, was a child of his time.

Stéphane Mandelbaum, Tower MMK Frankfurt, Taunustor 1, until October 30th.