Tourists heading to Berlin for a culture fix this spring will not have to pay an entrance fee to a gallery to view the German capital’s best-kept art secret.

On the corner of Kurfürstenstrasse and Budapester Strasse, just across from the Berlin aquarium, visitors can admire a rarely seen black and white work by the pop art pioneer Eduardo Paolozzi, lost to the world for three decades until its re-emergence earlier this year.

The exhibition will not be accepting offers from willing buyers, however – mainly because the canvas is a 990 sq metre concrete wall – and in any case is due to shut down permanently over the next few months.

Painted on the side of a building in 1976 to mark the end of the Scottish artist’s one-year stay in Berlin, the mural was soon covered up by banking offices that are currently being demolished, thus briefly revealing its retro-futuristic curves just as a smaller replica of the same work is on display at the Berlinische Galerie on the other side of the city.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The mural in all its glory in 1970s Berlin. Photograph: Ingeborg Lommatzsch

By the summer of 2020, Paolozzi’s painting will again disappear behind a new 60-metre high office building with an all-glass facade and a large rooftop terrace, making it part of a growing number of iconic murals that are vanishing from Berlin’s cityscape as developers fill in the empty lots carved out by second world war bombs.

A political triptych between Savignyplatz and Zoologischer Garten metro stations, featuring Marx and Engels gazing down sceptically from a cloud, is due to disappear behind a block of “micro apartments” aimed at “business commuters and singles”, scheduled for completion next year.

Even the days of a mural that once inspired a wave of more than 200 similar artworks across west Berlin are numbered. A real estate developer is building his new offices at Tiergarten station directly in front of Ben Wagin’s so-called Weltbaum or “world tree” mural, a composite of several artists’ paintings warning of the threat of environmental destruction.

When Wagin painted his mural in 1975, Berlin discovered wall paintings as an opportunity to brighten up a city still associated with cold war drabness. Paolozzi’s work, conceived in the same year, came out of a competition sponsored and initiated by the Berlin senate.

Soon, though, local authorities began to worry that allowing artists to paint copyrighted works on the side of buildings could create obstacles for urban regeneration: from 1976 onwards, many artists who were commissioned had to sign a waiver saying what they had painted was not a work of art.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A giant mural in the Kreuzberg district. Street art has brightened up the sides of many Berlin buildings bordering vacant lots. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

As a result, the senate now professes ignorance about the artworks that have shaped Berlin’s visual identity in the eyes of the world. While Paolozzi’s mosaics at Tottenham Court Road tube station in London were painstakingly restored during the station’s recent renovation, no mention had to be made of Paolozzi’s mural in the planning application for the “Westlight” office block, and a spokesperson at the investor Barings said there were no plans to make the mural visible from outside or within the new structure.

“We try to work hand in hand with developers to save Paolozzi’s heritage whenever we can,” said Toby Treves, a trustee of the Scottish artist’s foundation and a former Tate curator. “The difficulty with public art is that we no longer know who is responsible for a lot of it.”

Norbert Martins, a local historian and photographer who has spent the last 40 years documenting the story of Berlin street art, said: “Many artists recognise that their murals were always going to be temporary, and that you can’t protect them.

“But the senate isn’t coming anywhere near to exhausting the potential of its street art for tourism. Cities like Lyon and Brussels show it could be done very differently. At least with the original mural the senate could have made sure that it will be reproduced elsewhere.”



Wagin has a similar belief in the essential transience of all street art. “Cities are sandpits: you spend ages building your beautiful little castle, and then comes the flood and washes it all away,” said the 88-year-old artist. “That’s how it goes with art in cities.”

However, he has not lost hope that his “world tree” painting could be replanted somewhere else. A group of younger street artists have already announced their willingness to paint a slightly modified version of Wagin’s classic at another location in the city.

Inhabitants of a building on Albrechtstrasse have reportedly offered up their wall, which is clearly visible from Friedrichstrasse station. And the investor whose building project will cover up the original has agreed to donate scaffolding and painting equipment.