Artist Thierry Noir had an ulterior motive when he visited Loyola Marymount University last week to participate in a forum about public art. He wanted to make time for a private moment with a work he’d created 22 years earlier – the painting on the segment of the Berlin Wall displayed on the LMU campus.
In 1984, Noir was a young French artist living in a German youth center. The center’s view was dominated by the Berlin Wall, the 187-mile barrier that separated East and West Berlin from 1961 to 1989. The wall was a depressing environment, he said in heavily accented English. “It was boring … it was very melancholic with only the change of guards every eight hours, that was the highlight of the day.”
One day, Noir took action. “I started to paint spontaneously,” he said. But his need to turn the wall into a canvas was not an easy project to take on.
Noir couldn’t afford paint, so he and friends scavenged government neighborhood improvement sites at night and collected discarded paint cans. He mixed the colors he found in the bottom of the cans to form his palette.
He also quickly realized that painting the wall was dangerous. The entire wall stood in East Germany, and guards ambushed him one day as he worked. He narrowly escaped arrest. From that point on, Noir said, he learned to paint with one eye on the wall and the other on the guards. “I started to simplify my style using two ideas and three colors (per section); stir the whole thing up and paint.”
Over the next six years he painted five kilometers – 3.1 miles – of the wall. “I probably painted more of the wall than anyone else,” he said.
When the wall was dismantled, segments were shipped all over the world to be displayed as symbols of the oppression and cruelty of the Cold War. Noir likes to visit them when he travels to a city that has one, “because it’s a part of my life, this wall.” Although invited to LMU for the dedication of the wall segment in 1997, Noir couldn’t attend, so he was excited to see it on campus and recognized it as part of a mural he created in 1987 for the German film “Wings of Desire.”
Noir said it is fitting to have a piece of the wall displayed on a college campus, “… to teach young people, please don’t make the same mistakes as your parents.”
