Berlin Wall pieces painted by Kiddy Citny

Kiddy Citny painted the Kreuzberg face of the Wall along Waldemarstraße in 1984 and 1985: two large hearts spread across four elements, a long frieze of king's heads, and, in October 1985, the right-hand part of the run he shared with Thierry Noir. That stretch is unusually well dated, because Liselotte and Armin Orgel-Köhne photographed it the same year and the pictures were used everywhere for Berlin's 750th anniversary in 1987; the same segments are visible in Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire. Most travelling segments cannot be checked against a dated image. These can.

Two of those segments were the first complete pieces of the Wall shipped officially to the United States, in January 1990, and the collection follows what the trade did to them. Both hearts can be accounted for in full. One pair was auctioned at Monaco in June 1990 and stands on a private property near Basel. The other went to New York for the launch of the American trade, was sawn in two to make a sale, and is now split between Peter Max's store in New Jersey and Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. The five Noir and Citny panels went from 520 Madison Avenue into storage in Connecticut. Two king's heads have come home to the Märkisches Museum, a kilometre from the street they were painted on. And at Jarnac, where the Monaco catalogue had credited his heart to Noir, Citny was filmed in 2009 renewing his own painting after the weather had worn it away.