Letter from Berlin

Letter from Berlin

Courtesy S. Schleyer

Galerie Eigen+Art's Gerd Lybke, second from right in front, with his staff. Lybke helped bring recognition to the Leipzig School of painters.

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One blustery day last winter, Werner Tammen, head of the 380-member Berlin Gallery Association, received a call from Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s foreign minister and vice-chancellor. Could Tammen, the minister wanted to know, give him and some aides a personal tour of the Berlin gallery scene that’s attracted so much attention? The unusual request signaled the potent new standing that contemporary art has acquired in the city’s political realm. “The politicians have finally caught up. We’ve been after them for five years,” says the dealer, whose rambling, 27-year old Galerie Tammen sits just 100 yards from Checkpoint Charlie.“They’re finally discovering that art is the most important thing that Berlin has going for it: 100 new galleries in the past four years, 6,000 artists, and much of the art at the last Documenta and at the last Venice Biennale was produced in Berlin.”

A long-standing complaint had been that the city was benefiting from its prominence as a new art center without really contributing to the scene’s development. But late last year, the authorities came forth with tangible contributions. The Berlin Senate, as the city administration is called, provided a large tract of land where the old Imperial Palace had been situated, for the construction of a temporary €850,000 ($1.3 million) contemporary art museum called White Cube. Despite a huge municipal debt, officials also agreed to consider financing a permanent museum.

As a result, Berlin’s art scene has evolved from a spontaneous flowering of wild experimentation—sprouting far and wide wherever the rents were cheapest—into an established part of the political and commercial landscape. The wildness is still there at the edges, but the core is now a cluster of rooted settlements. The artists and galleries keep coming; earlier this year two prominent galleries—Michael Werner Contemporary and Ulrich Fiedler Modern Design—abandoned Cologne for Berlin. The newcomers today are drawn by far more than just cheap rents. There’s the siren call of opportunity, the unrestricted nightlife, the ultratolerant atmosphere verging on anything goes.

Some Berliners believe there is also a yearning to recapture the 1920s, the city’s last golden age before the cataclysm of the 1930s. For the old and the new are constantly grating against each other in Berlin. When the White Cube opens its doors early this summer—following the Berlin Biennale and May’s popular Gallery Weekend—the boxy blue-and-white building, designed by Viennese architect Adolf Krischanitz, will contrast starkly with the 19th-century Neo-Baroque and Neoclassical edifices nearby. Similarly, the Biennale, running from April 5 to June 15, will take place inside Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie and outside on nearly 540,000 square feet of open land along what used to be called the death strip, next to the old Berlin Wall.

Nowhere is the contrast of old and new more evident than on the Auguststrasse, the city’s most famous art strip, in east Berlin’s Mitte district. The ateliers, galleries and minor auction houses are so inconspicuous that, head down and coat collar up on a cold day, one might miss them. The contemporary works in the windows and showrooms—which include pieces by top-tier local artists like Thomas Demand, Carsten Nicolai and Frank Nitsche—clash glaringly with the unadorned, even drab exteriors.

And that is exactly how the young Berliners who inhabit these narrow streets want them to remain—dressed down, just as they are with their old army parkas and mile-long mufflers. Only a small unlit neon sign with the letters KW advertises the hub here: the four-story Kunst Werke, a semiofficial commune of studios, a courtyard café and exhibition spaces that was one of the two founding institutions of the Auguststrasse in 1991, shortly after the collapse of the Wall and Berlin’s reunification. The other was the Galerie Eigen + Art, run by Gerd Lybke, a key promoter of the Leipzig School and the district’s best-known personality.