Lincoln Square artist Lothar Speer recalled the time in 1991 he was called to O’Hare Airport to pick up a shipment of Keim paint. He’d ordered it directly from its German manufacturer for an outdoor mural he planned to create. Keim is an expensive, mineral silicate paint whose colors bind tightly to surfaces and can last decades, so Speer was horrified to see a customs inspector don rubber gloves and reach into the buckets to check for contraband, precious liquid pigment dripping from his arms.
“The mural has never gotten defaced, even with certain groups of young [taggers] in the neighborhood,” declared Speer. But while the Keim paint has largely held up—buildings painted with it in Germany in the late 19th century are still in fine shape, with periodic touch ups—the wall has suffered some indignities in recent years that have damaged the mural, giving it a scruffy, neglected look. It was battered by CAC building renovations almost a decade ago, and bruised a couple years later by a festival tent. In both cases, he couldn’t raise the funds to repair the wall and repaint the mural.
“I’d hate to lose it—it’s a big part of our community,” Dagmar Freiberger, president of the DANK Haus, told me in June. She had first approached Speer last fall with what each of them agreed were “last hurrah” ideas to help save the mural. But since the March shutdown, the 61-year-old organization, which occupies a hulking, six-story former men’s social club and hotel on Western near Lawrence, has plunged deep in the red due to the cancellation of classes, cultural events, room rentals, and festivals.
But you could hardly make a living in Chicago as a Renaissance-style artist who ground his own pigments with pestles. After seeing a flyer, Speer trained for and worked as a caricature artist at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee. “It’s one thing to be overqualified” for work most artists would consider “carny, low-brow,” he said. “It’s another thing to make money drawing—it didn’t matter what style.” In 1997 Speer founded Faces in Focus Event and Party Art, a crew of artists and illustrators who create caricatures and portraits of tourists at Navy Pier and other locations. (The business is closed indefinitely because of the pandemic.)
“As an immigrant, there’s always a part of you that’s homesick,” he said. “I wanted to paint from my heart my memories of Germany.” He knew the building’s owner, Helmut Bantle, who gave the team permission to paint the wall. “He was from Stuttgart, too,” Speer told me. “We could talk [the German dialect] Swabian together!” (Speer’s animated sentences frequently end with oral exclamation points.)
By 2011, the building became a gym. Chicago Athletic Clubs chain owner and Marc Realty principal Larry Weiner along with his brother Elliot, also a Marc principal, formed an LLC and bought the 10,000-square foot Northern Home Furnishings building for $2.45 million, according to the April 29, 2010 Crain’s Chicago Business (Marc Realty wasn’t involved in the venture). According to Crain’s and Speer, Weiner promised Schulter that the mural wouldn’t be changed or removed. Speer also maintained that Schulter had recommended to Weiner that Speerbe rehired to repaint the artwork after a zoning change enabled building renovation work.
