Berlin Wall drives wedge through LA art community

Call it the Irony Curtain.

The concrete wall that divided the city of Berlin for 28 years is suddenly splitting a segment of Los Angeles' art community just as the 20th anniversary of the wall's falling nears.

The trouble began earlier this month when the Wende Museum installed several segments of the original Berlin Wall on Wilshire Boulevard.

Kent Twitchell, whose larger-than-life paintings cover entire walls and sides of freeways, said he planned to "bookend" two sections of the wall with portraits of President John F. Kennedy, who denounced the barrier in a Berlin speech in 1961, and President Ronald Reagan, who famously demanded, "Tear down this wall!" shortly before it came down in 1989.

But as he rushed to finish the portraits, Twitchell said he was told by organizers that he could leave one of the paintings in his studio: There was no room for both.

"They said there would only be room for one and they just assumed it would be Kennedy," the disappointed artist said this week as he continued to work at putting the final touches on the Reagan one.

"It's unfortunate," Twitchell said, "because the way I work, I do a concept, plan the concept out and put it up. Now, if there's not room enough for two presidents, just one, my whole thesis of one at the beginning of the Cold War and one at the end is gone."

Justinian Jampol, whose Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War is mounting the public exhibition along a busy, museum-lined street in the city's Miracle Mile district, said Twitchell's vision got sliced in half when some of the sections of the wall acquired from Germany came covered in historic graffiti.

Because the museum is ethically obligated to preserve that, Jampol said it had to cut the size of Twitchell's display in half to fit him in along with three other artists invited to take part.

Twitchell complained that once the project's organizers ran out of room they indicated they wanted him to show up with Kennedy, not Reagan, when he mounts his work on the 10-foot-high wall across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Saturday.

But Jampol said presidential preferences never played a role.

"I would take either one," he said. "It's just really a space issue, and Kent happened to do the Kennedy one first."

Jerri Levi, who curated an exhibition of Twitchell's work at Los Angeles' Look Gallery earlier this year, complained that putting Kennedy in and leaving Reagan out is akin to censoring Twitchell's work.

"Whether that censorship was deliberate or unintentional, it's still censorship," she said.

Jampol said there's still a chance both portraits could be displayed. The delivery of two sections of the wall was delayed, and if they arrive free of historic graffiti, he said, Twitchell is welcome to use them. If not, he said he'd be amenable to placing Reagan's face over Kennedy's at some point so everyone could see it. The exhibition continues until the end of the year.

The Berlin Wall project is the most ambitious undertaking for the fledgling Wende museum that was founded by Jampol in 2002 to preserve east German culture that he feared was vanishing with the wall's demise.

Among its artifacts is a section of the wall containing an original mural by Thierry Noir, leader of a handful of Berlin-based artists who risked their lives in the 1980s by painting colorful murals on the wall while it still divided their city.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the wall's destruction, the museum acquired 10 more slabs from the German government and invited Twitchell, Noir and two other local artists to paint on them. It also constructed a temporary wall and invited Shepard Fairey and other artists to paint on that one.

The temporary wall is to be placed across Wilshire Boulevard on Sunday night and, after bringing traffic to a standstill for a while, will be toppled during a midnight celebration.

When it came to selecting artists for the permanent wall, Jampol said Twitchell was one of the first people he thought of.

"I'm from Los Angeles, and I really remember Kent's murals of the 1984 Olympics and the impact they had," he said. "The first thing that came to my mind... was that Kent Twitchell has had a very important impact on the art of this city."