Nicole Monteran is a French artist who I met through Joseph and Mary when we went on the Fat Tire Bike Tour of Berlin. She has lived in Berlin for over thirty years, yet remains very French in her comme il faut elegance. Her apartment in Charlottenburg is full of space, light, everything white, and objets d'art placed just so. The white painted floors set off the pieces of decorated furniture and collected paintings. Her own work is figurative and very assured of Berliners interacting, done in that almost caricature way like a combination of Chagall, Matisse and Georges Groz. Another strand of Berlin life revealed. Back I went to much more messy Bohemian Mitte and again spent many hours agonising over colour values. How to achieve exactly what I envisage remains elusive. I am going to have to achieve the effect I want by not using the colour I wish I could get but using another with the final effect being still what I wanted. Or at least try.
At the Milchhof Sculpture Space two English sculptors both Goldsmith graduates are opening their exhibition from 4 pm up to 9pm. So from light afternoon until pitch-black night with the range of lighting becoming a feature, especially with Charlotte McGowan-Griffin's light installation. She now lives in Berlin but it turned out that when she used to teach at Exeter, Tom was doing his first degree and she was his tutor. Dean Kenning who uses electrified kinetics is only in Berlin for the opening. He teaches at University College Canterbury. It was all very friendly and I kept going in and out and took photographs.
Thinking ahead to when these paintings will actually be finished with the colour relationships worked out, masonry nails have to be bought at OBI, (standing for German DIY) which is a bit of a walk away, but passes a second-hand shop which is always a plus. Once out it is irresistible not to have lunch in the café at Rosenthaler Platz and sit around reading the weekend Guardian newspaper that comes out on Saturdays. This is a treat for me lasting for a few days if rationed properly. Back at the studio the sturdy big nails refuse to penetrate the thick stone outer walls. Instead the solution is to use the thinner masonry nails but more of them. Finally, the elements of the hanging are marked out and put into place. There is an air of anticipation in the studio with the new arrangement of tables and sequence of paintings lined up.
Dresden is only two hours from Berlin by train, and I was looking forward to seeing the famed Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister painting museum, as well as the newly rebuilt Frauenkirche faithful copy of the original destroyed in the war. Getting out of the train nothing but hideousness could be seen. During the occupation the DDR didn't do much re-building preferring to leave the destruction as accusation of guilt against the Allies. Some of what they did do, of anonymous concrete Soviet styled buildings is being knocked down. If anything could make the horribleness of war, and revenge sink in, this should do it. Completely flattened by Bomber Harris's firestorm raids as response to the bombing and destruction of Coventry the two cities are twinned not only by their destruction but also in their rebuilt, unappealing mediocrity. Tower blocks and shopping mall banality is all that can be seen, nothing remotely like the word Dresden conjures up, of an established historical city. Staggering past all that, one wonders how people can stand it and why wars go on. Then of a sudden the Cathedral looms, and a cluster of immensely beautiful Baroque buildings. How did this magnificence survive is then the question, and gratefulness that it did. It is an uneasy mix of revulsion at the devastation of war and awe at what remains that I feel. The replica Frauenkirche glows and its soft pastel colours enchant but however lovely, it looks too new, lacking the accretion of feeling that it will acquire over the next hundred years, if it is still there. What is not at all a mystery is why the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister is so famed. Again it is overwhelming to see so many and such great works hung on the walls, packed in tightly. Rembrandts and Titians are so numerous that some you will see hung very high up. And without crowds pressing in. I can't believe my eyes there are two such important masterpieces as The Bride and The Letter by Vermeer in an empty gallery. Room after room of Cranachs many of which I have never even seen reproduced before are completely mesmerizing. Let alone that strange painting with the two angels at the bottom that all the greeting cards love so much, Raphael's Sistine Madonna. A glimpse of greatness in spite of all.
"The most secret movements of the inner world are inaccessible to words." -Hegel. Berlin with all the interleaving of sinister violence, layered decadence, its brilliance of intellectual thought, outpourings of creativity, music swirling over all, has also its physical elements as great implacable givens. When I first arrived, the heavy gloom was palpable. It was dark, it rained, I couldn't see. It then snowed, it was dark, I couldn't see. Since then it rained, it was dark, I couldn't see. It rained and rained, snowed and snowed, was dark, and I couldn't see. Being built on a swamp, the water table is high, and with so much reconstruction digging down for the vast new structures, water has to be constantly pumped out of these sites into the river Spree. The sewers smell of dank foulness as one passes their vents. All of this is imbedded into Berlin, as much as the grisly past, points of candle lights, magnificent accomplishments. There is movement in all this, change and the excitement of new possibilities, perhaps uniquely so. These shifting blocks, at this time, and here.
Now, overnight before my eyes sunlight has entered Berlin, transforming it entirely. Throwing off the long dark winter, everyone is out on the streets and parks breathing in sunlight through their pores. One can feel the instinctive awakening; at last it has come. One turns one's face to the light. Up on the hill of Mauer (Wall) Park, it is as crowded and festive as any beach in the summer. After all the darkness this brilliant explosion of sunlight has magnetically drawn everyone outside as if sucked by a radiant vacuum. The Milchhof studio building is empty of artists. It may be a false spring, so enjoy it now. On the hill built out of the debris and bones of war, the large swings swoop out over the city, both children and adults pump their legs swinging out, letting their cares, the past go. Here comes the Future. We are alive.
