Berlin Wall pieces in sculptures by Edwina Sandys
Breakthrough at Fulton and BreakFree at Hyde Park: one sculpture cut from eight segments, and a second made from the figures cut out of it.
Edwina Sandys, Winston Churchill's granddaughter, flew to Berlin early in 1990 and chose eight sections herself from near the Brandenburg Gate. Assembled at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, they became Breakthrough: about 11 ft high and 32 ft long, with two human silhouettes cut clean out of the concrete so that the Wall can be walked through. It was dedicated on 9 November 1990, one year to the day after the opening, with Ronald Reagan present, on the lawn where Churchill had delivered the “iron curtain” speech in 1946. The surviving graffiti on the segments repeats the word UNWAHR, untrue; her contribution is what was cut away.
The offcuts were kept. The two silhouettes became BreakFree, dedicated in 1994 in the Freedom Court of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library at Hyde Park, New York: twelve-foot concrete figures, a man and a woman, emerging from a tangle of oversized barbed wire, read through Roosevelt's 1941 Four Freedoms address, with a bust of Churchill facing them across the court. The void in one sculpture is the substance of the other, eight hundred miles away.
Fulton
Breakthrough: eight segments with two silhouettes cut through, dedicated on 9 November 1990 where Churchill spoke in 1946.
Hyde Park
BreakFree: the two silhouettes cut from Breakthrough, dedicated in the library's Freedom Court in 1994.
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