Berlin

In February I spent a fabulous week in Berlin. My friend Sharon Avery Fahlstrom curated an exhibition of her husband, Oyvind Fahlstrom's work at the Aurel Scheibler Gallery in the Mitte section of the former East Berlin. I arrived two days before the opening so I was able to help out a bit - I helped Aurel's assistant Rebecca attach wall labels while Sharon made the rounds of the gallery, dabbing touch-ups on the walls. One of my favorites - "The Garden" is in this show.

The show is beautiful and has generated glowing reviews in the Berlin & the Frankfurt press. The show comes down the end of April except for The Garden. That piece will be up until the third week of June. After the opening we all celebrated at a lovely dinner hosted by Aurel at a nearby restaurant, Sale e Tabachi. The menu was orechiette con broccoli rabe, grilled bronzino with a fennel/caper sauce and lemon sorbet in vodka for dessert. And of course, copious amounts of wine. (Sharon and I shared several memorable meals at Sale & Tabachi: calves' liver in a Marsala reduction & fried sage leaves, and for a late dinner - vitello tonato for me and a lovely seafood soup for Sharon.)

It was bitter cold but luckily my hotel was so well located I could walk down the Unter den Linden a couple of blocks to the Brandenburg Gate and then to Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial - a sculptural land art piece that reminded me a little of the Cretto di Burri - Alberto Burri's memorial to the 1968 earthquake victims of Gibellina, Sicily. The next day I went to Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum - an architectural masterpiece. BTW, my son Michael Scaduto graduated from the Cooper Union School of Architecture. Eisenman was one of his teachers, Libeskind is a Cooper Union alumna and I also saw a house deigned by John Hejduk - former Dean of CU School of Architecture. Cooper Union is well represented in Berlin.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, a friend brought me a small zip-lock bag filled with pieces of "wall" rubble. On the sidewalk outside the hotel I stayed at is a standing segment of the wall, beautifully graffiti decorated. Many of the streets are clearly marked with a cobblestone line, to mark where the wall separated East from West. Checkpoint Charlie still stands as a Cold War Era monument and you can have your photo taken with an actor portraying a U.S. or Soviet soldier - just like the "gladiators" posing outside the Colosseum in Rome. There is also the "Wall" museum - very much a home-made collection of cold war/wall memorabilia, art and personal mementos donated by Berliners. It's all slightly cheesy but absolutely heartfelt.

Towards the end of my trip I met with one of the Stevies Artisans, Naemeh Shirazi who now lives and creates her sculpted lace jewelry in Berlin. We met at a hip coffee house - St Oberholtz in Rosenthaler Platz. (It is so easy to get around Berlin on public transport: the UBahn subway and the elevated SBahn and buses & trams.) Naemeh and I caught up over dinner - foccacia, pork schnitzel and creamy broccoli soup for Naemeh - and we exchanged 20 yards of lace and 2 bottles of dye I brought from NYC so she can make lots of beautiful lace earrings, many in new styles she has developed. She gave me a ton of new inventory which I've added to my website, which is now live - http://www.steviesartisans.com

On our last day Berlin we hit the art museums. Our whirlwind visit began with the Neues National - a Mies Van der Rohe building that houses a superb modern art collection: Kirchner, Dix, Klee, Picasso, etc. Then we headed for Museum island for the Pergamon to see the cobalt blue tiled Ishtar Gate, the colossal Market Gate of Miletus and the Pergamon Altar which is even more magnificent then the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum. We had a Turkish meal at the Pergamon Museum cafe - a splendid idea to serve a menu that is themed to the art collection. Then we went on to the Neues Museum to see the bust of Nefertiti and a lovely Egyptian art and sculpture collection.

We ended the day with a very quick tour of the Hamburger Bahnhoff led by the director, Udo Kittlemann (a friend of Sharon). The Hamburg Bahnhof, a former railway terminus is repurposed as the national contemporary art museum: Joseph Beuy's archive and art, Cy Twombly, Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol, etc.

Built in 1848, the Hamburger Bahnhof is the only surviving terminus in Berlin from the late neoclassical period and is one of the oldest station buildings in all of Germany. I loved the vaulted central gallery with its steel trusses - I know Sharon could imagine Falhlstrom's works installed in that space. Udo led us through an endless series of huge open galleries - spaces designed for really big works. Dusk was edging into night when we left and the building glowed with a Dan Flavin light installation. Magical!

I'd like to report that we ended our last day in Berlin with a fabulous meal, but instead we had an acceptable meal at Berlin's so called "best" restaurant. We should have gone back to Sale e Tabachi. I left the next morning - bitter cold but filled with brilliant sunshine - perfect for my bus ride to the airport to return home. I look forward to returning some spring to see the linden trees in full bloom on the Unter den Linden.