Berlin Wall pieces painted by Thierry Noir

Thierry Noir painted the Berlin Wall while it stood. Between 1984 and 1989 he put more than five kilometres of it under paint, working from the Kreuzberg side to make the thing, in his words, colourful and ridiculous and so remove some of its threat. The heads in profile, nose, lips and round skull, recur across this collection. When the GDR sold the painted segments in 1990 his work travelled with the concrete: it is on the five Waldemarstraße panels of October 1985, Noir on the left and Kiddy Citny on the right, that stood for years at 520 Madison Avenue and are now in storage in Connecticut; on the segment the Luftwaffe flew to the Bundeswehr's command at Reston; and in faded traces on the element a photographer drove home to Albinea on a low-loader.

What makes the collection unusual is how much of it was painted after 1989. Noir has kept painting pieces of the Wall for whoever asked: four elements at the AlliiertenMuseum in Berlin, two heads made specially for the Air Force museum at Dayton, a segment for Plovdiv in 2019 carrying a message to future generations, one of the ten segments on Wilshire Boulevard, four double-sided segments at Miami Ironside repainted during Art Basel 2013, a museum doorway in Lewisham, and segments that had never been painted at all in Ludwik Wasecki's meadow at Sosnówka. A record here may therefore show 1980s paint on the west face of the border, or a painting applied decades later in another country on commission. The notes say which, and each record page says what its sources support.

Noir and Citny worked side by side on the same stretches and are confused constantly. The Battery Park segments are attributed to Noir by the Federal Foundation and to Citny by the New York research, and both readings are kept; the Monaco auction catalogue credited a Citny heart to Noir. The two artists sued the companies that sold their paintings, which is told in Who Painted the Berlin Wall?.