Rebecca Wallersteiner travels to Brussels to select her highlight of the BRAFA Art Fair 2020
The Berlin Wall installation at BRAFA 2020 in Brussels – photo credit BRAFA 2020 Fabrice Debatty
There are some objects that appeal to the viewer not for their beauty, or for their or rareness, or history, but for what they represent. Such an appeal applied to five monumental, colourfully daubed segments of the former Berlin Wall which were the highlight of the recent BRAFA Art Fair in Brussels. Last November marked 30 years since the boundary between East and West Berlin came down, from which moment ‘mauerpicks’ (wall woodpeckers), including members of my own family, chipped off and pocketed fragments of its concrete bulk as mementoes.
Standing in front of the sombre monolith like installation, on a freezing winter night in Brussels, lightly brushed by falling snow, the following memories flashed across my mind. “The best thing about Berlin is the Berlin Wall,” said Lucian Freud on the night it was torn down on 9th November 1989, when I asked if he had seen the news. My family’s reaction was different: Earlier that day I had spoken to my mother who said that she and my uncle had been in tears seeing people streaming through the wall. Like Lucian, my mother was from Berlin. Unlike him, she did not need to flee. Had Lucian stayed, it is almost certain he would have died in a concentration camp. Aged eleven, Lucian and his family, who were Jewish fled Berlin and the Nazis and came to England as refugees. Although my father was Jewish and he also left Germany, my mother’s family were Catholics and their main fear in 1945 was of Russian invasion of Berlin and the horrors that would entail. My grandmother who helped bring us up never talked about the Russian ‘liberation’ of Berlin in 1945. I later learnt that many of the women had been raped by Russian soldiers. Perhaps it is not surprising that she did not mention this.
On the day the Communist East German (GDR) government began building the Wall, my great-aunt Frieda, who never married and ran a grocery shop in East Berlin put on as many clothes as she could hide under a heavy winter coat, packed a suitcase and walked across to West Berlin, never to return home. It was a weekend and most Berliners were already asleep when the East German government started to close the border. Homeless Frieda joined her sister, my grandmother, in West Berlin and later spent summers with us in Westgate (sleepy neighbour of Tracey Emin’s Margate), where would whisper haunting tales of bloated bodies floating down the river when the Russians took Berlin in 1945, and taught us the Russian for ‘hallo’ and ‘cigarette’ when my grandmother wasn’t around.
In reality, The Berlin Wall should have been called the Berlin Walls. Not only was it expanded and changed many times since it was first built on August 12-13th 1961 – it was also multi-layered and much more than a concrete wall. The East German government built it as part of a complex, multi-level security system to stop West Berliners ‘going over to the West. Most of the work was already done in the early hours of that Sunday and by the time Berliners woke the border around West Berlin was closed. GDR border guards had started tearing up roads and were building barbed wire fences. On August 15th large concrete hollow blocks were used for the first time and the first wall was built and later strengthened.
BRAFA Art Fair’s Chairman Harold t’Kint de Roodenbeke said, “I first stumbled across a segment of the Berlin Wall in a village fishing in Nova Scotia, Canada – it felt completely improbable seeing such a thing there, but the reaction of the people around was almost spiritual – rather as if they were modern standing stones. When I returned home I researched the topic and travelled to Berlin where I acquired five of the last remaining intact sectors with the aim of auctioning them for charity.” These impressive 3.8 metre, 3.6 ton segments were originally taken from the Hinterlandmauer, or the 68km ‘inner wall’ that blocked off the border strip to East Berlin. They were dismantled by the armed forces of the East German government, during the demolition works following the fall of the Berlin Wall and feature striking graffiti on both sides by anonymous street artists from different periods.
Although painting the wall was not permitted, Berlin’s artists used it as the longest canvas in the world and an open air art gallery. However, works of art were often painted over by other artists within a few days, or weeks. Much of the wall was broken up and used to build streets and motorways. The few remaining large segments are either privately owned, or in museums.
The hinterland wall was built in June 1962 to make it more difficult to flee to the west and the first wall was expanded. A few years later the first two walls were replaced by a new wall consisting of concrete slabs, embedded between steel and concrete posts and crowned with a concrete ‘wall crown’ which made it almost impossible to overcome the Berlin Wall. To this day, no attempt to escape has been known to have successfully enabled the classic ‘over the wall and away’ escape. My great-aunt Frieda was one of the last East Berliners to escape East Germany as the wall was being built. Other East Berliners were not so lucky – many were shot trying to climb, or burrow beneath the wall to reach the West and freedom.
Other highlights at this year’s BRAFA include The Bather, (1910) a haunting, symbolist watercolour by Belgian artist Leon Spilliaert, presented by Harold t’Kint de Roodenbeke. Presently being honoured with a major exhibition in London’s Royal Academy, Spilliaert is best known for his mysterious Symbolist works depicting nocturnal landscapes and windswept beach scenes – with a hazy, dreamlike atmosphere.
An ethereally beautiful, wintry gem which caught my attention was Route Enneigée avec Maison, Environs d’Eragny, a rare snow painting executed by Camille Pissarro, in 1885, at his home in Eragny and presented by Stern Pissarro, London. Owned by the great-granddaughter of Camille Pissarro, this gallery has impressively represented five generations of Pissarro family artists.
Whenever in Brussels, I stay at the charming Hotel Amigo, owned by Rocco Forte, and designed by his elegant sister Olga Polizzi. Set in a 500 year old townhouse, Hotel Amigo blends typical Anglo-Italian warmth with style. The bathrooms are marbled and spotless. On my last visit, I woke late to the sound of a marching brass band and peered out of the hotel window in time to see the band dressed in military costume parading along winding cobbled streets to the medieval Grand Place, with its magnificent Guild-houses, a short walk from the hotel. After breakfast I visited Brussels iconic Mannequin Pis statue, a street away from the hotel to find that the band had dressed the usually naked Mannequin in a charming, miniature military outfit.
Rebecca Wallersteiner stayed at the Hotel Amigo, Rue de l’Amigo 1-3, Brussels and visited the BRAFA Art Fair, in Brussels.
www.brafa.art