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.

“People from all over the world came to Berlin because it was so empty,” Lybke recalls of the early ’90s. “No lamps in the street. No hot water. No telephone. Nothing. You woke up and said, ‘What am I this day? Okay, I am a filmmaker, so let’s make a film!’ ” Back in the ’80s, Lybke himself had awakened as a gallery owner involved in nonconformist art in the East German city of Leipzig, a role that helped him get started in a big way in Berlin with such Leipzig School artists as Neo Rauch, Tim Eitel and Uwe Kowski.

“It started changing a lot after 1996,” Lybke says, “and nowadays that old underground chic works in parallel with a new bohemian bourgeois. There’s more singing about money. In that way, Berlin has moved to becoming a normal town.” Lybke’s own success has enabled him to turn his original gallery back in Leipzig into a palatial showplace, but he makes a point of keeping his main gallery, on the Auguststrasse, as low-key as any on the street, almost as though there were an ordinance against glitter.

Across town, in west Berlin, tradition reigns. West of the Tiergarten park and the Kaiser Wilhem Memorial Church, whose bomb-shattered bell tower stands as a reminder of World War II, the leafy avenues of Charlottenburg are as upscale as they’ve always been. Think Madison Avenue as opposed to the Auguststrasse’s funky East Village. Some successful artists make their homes here and almost apologize for it. “Charlottenburg is bourgeois as hell,” British-born film artist Tacita Dean told a New York audience last year. “But, my, it’s very comfortable.” Other prominent artists who call Berlin home include Denmark-born Olafur Eliasson, Italy’s Monica Bonvicini and Canada’s Janet Cardiff.

Charlottenburg, too, displays evidence of the protracted east-west divide that Berlin Senate arts coordinator Ingrid Wagner calls “the enduring Wall of the mind.” By this, she means in part the paradoxical way in which east Berlin, whose artists were forced to toe the line of Socialist Realism before reunification, has maintained the spirit of its old dissident culture, while west Berlin has perpetuated its traditionalist orthodoxy. While Berlin was divided, “we remained stuck in figurative realism in the West,” says Wagner, who taught at the University of Art in the British sector in those years. “We didn’t know just how isolated we were.” Today the spacious showrooms along Charlottenburg’s Fasanenstrasse are filled with mostly 18th- and 19th-century  and modern art, especially Expressionist works. And in the stately 19th-century mansion that houses Villa Grisebach, Berlin’s premier auction house, such works are gaveled down for millions of euros. On the November day last year when August Macke’s 1914 Woman with a Parrot in a Landscape fetched €2 million ($2.9 million) at the house, Jorge Carrera, a Paris-based dealer on his first visit to Berlin, grinned happily over his own €135,000 ($195,000) acquisition of a 1958 Jesús Rafael Soto for a Miami client. “I had no idea of the extent of the art market here,” he said. “The whole city has a magic—also a dark magic that seems to emanate from its history.”

That magic continues to lure top-drawer international galleries such as New York’s Goff + Rosenthal, London and Zurich’s Haunch of Venison, and Lugano and Cologne’s Buchmann Galerie, which have all set up branches in Berlin. The trend has been under way for two years, as leading Berlin artists increasingly insist that their dealers be on hand to exhibit them in the city. Even galleries not subject to such pressure are showing up, such as Stockholm design and decorative arts firm Jacksons, whose Berlin branch opens this spring in a new gallery building near Daniel Liebeskind’s groundbreaking Jewish Museum, in the Kreuzberg. Other tenants will include Galerie Nordenhake, Dresden’s Lehmann Brothers and Norway’s Galleri Opdahl. Some collectors are also arriving. Dieter Rosenkranz, a Wuppertal industrialist and philanthropist who collects modern art, retired to Berlin two years ago and is single-handedly financing the White Cube construction.

It’s a fact, though, that Berlin has no big old-guard collectors. Dealers thrive on out-of-town buyers, both German and foreign, and on the tourist trade. But if Art Forum Berlin, the city’s annual contemporary art fair, is any indication, a new generation of resident collectors is on the rise. They’re in their 30s and 40s. They tend to work in design, advertising or information technology. And they’ve helped Art Forum, which takes place from October 31 to November 3 this year, grow steadily for 12 years; last fall it drew 44,000 visitors and booked sales of €77 million ($111 million). Sabrina van der Ley, its founding director, confidently predicts that “in five years, Berlin will have bypassed London as a primary art market, a producing market.” Others are not so sure. Robert Ketterer, managing director of the Munich-based auction house Ketterer Kunst, has seen its showroom on Berlin’s Fasanenstrasse flourish just two years after opening, with every auction bringing 60 to 80 new buyers. But he has some doubts about the long-term promise of the contemporary art craze; he believes it runs the risk of flooding its own market. “When a dealer sells a big contemporary picture, it leaves a gap on the gallery wall,” he explains. “So what does he do? He phones the artist and says, ‘Paint another one—and another.’ That doesn’t happen with Expressionists, which are in finite supply.”

The newest gallery row is a world away from Charlottenburg. It extends a couple of kilometers northward along the Brunnenstrasse, in east Berlin. Dozens of small galleries, some of them still being outfitted and roller painted, stand cheek by jowl with old tenements, decrepit former squatter dwellings and a tall, early Art Nouveau building. The last now houses the Berlin Senate’s cultural section, which six years ago had the good sense to transfer its offices to where the action is. That move in turn drew more galleries. A storefront here still rents for just €500 ($740), and an apartment for €300 ($450). The showrooms, most of which feature emerging artists, provide an eyeful of the characteristics that much of Berlin’s art—wildly varied as it is—has in common: It’s bigger, because low rents mean more loft space. It’s younger, because arriving artists tend to be young. And, until recently at least, it was rougher, because installation artists, especially, worked with the old wood, bricks and I beams discarded in Berlin’s breakneck reconstruction.

Among the recent arrivals to the Brunnenstrasse is Aaron Moulton, a 30-year-old American who launched Feinkost Gallery last spring. He tends to show surreal, socially provocative works that denounce, say, urban blight or art for the market’s sake. “Why Berlin? Berlin simply has more scope for collaboration with the artists themselves,” says Moulton. “It’s still La Bohème. You see artists in a café, and you’re free to talk with them. Berlin is still very open—it’s still up for grabs.”

The city’s august old-line cultural institutions have little to fear from the vibrant new scene sprouting up around them. That’s because Berlin’s 35 museums, seven symphony orchestras, three operas and, to a lesser extent, its 30-odd theaters are all thriving. “There’s room for everybody,” says Doreet LeVitte Harten, a prominent independent curator in Berlin. “If anything, the museums are very happy because the young art crowd gives a dynamism to the city.”

That dynamism helps attract eight million tourists a year— an invaluable windfall for a city that has never replaced the heavy industry it lost in World War II or the advanced light industry that exited during the years of Cold War isolation. Without it, after all, what would Berlin be, but a morose, indebted trough of government offices and high unemployment? Instead, staid old culture and sassy new culture share the exhilaration of a voyage of discovery, as an unfinished Berlin searches for its future urban identity. As Mayor Klaus Wowereit is fond of saying, “Berlin may be poor, but it’s sexy.”

"Letter from Berlin" originally appeared in the April 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2008 Table of Contents.