---
author: Jan Brennenstuhl
categories:
- Street Art
cover:
  alt: German City Starts Preserving Street Art!
  height: 1396
  src: https://www.urbanartcore.com/german-city-starts-preserving-street-art/blek-le-rat-stencil.jpg
  width: 2480
credit: ''
date: '2012-05-13T10:12:54Z'
description: 'Preserving Street Art: Blek le Rat''s Madonna in Leipzig is a masterpiece. Should street art be preserved? In this case, Leipzig says yes!'
tags:
- Urban Planning
- Blek Le Rat
- Stencil Art
- Street Art Germany
title: German City Starts Preserving Street Art!
url: https://www.urbanartcore.com/german-city-starts-preserving-street-art/
---

# German City Starts Preserving Street Art!

Should graffiti be preserved? In the case of **Blek le Rat**’s *Madonna* masterpiece in Leipzig, the city says yes and what begun back in the early 1990s as a true love story, has now become an original precedent!

Several years ago, Blek le Rat - who nowadays is regarded as a stencil art pioneer - spray-painted a *Woman with Child* on an apartment building in Leipzig. He dedicated the Madonna to Sybille, the woman he was in love with. Today, they are already married for 20 years and the stencil art piece is still there and it will stay there for at least the next decades!

The reason for that development is that the piece is now on Saxony’s state list of historical monuments! It’s a German precedent - whereas Great Britain (with [**Banksy**](/banksy-myths-legends/)) and Switzerland (with **Harald Naegeli**) already started preserving street art, in Germany nobody would have ever thought to classify certain street artworks as culturally valuable...

*Typically, only bygone eras are represented on such lists, and it can take a long time for a monument to be chosen. But Le Rat’s Madonna was granted protected status in just three months. It’s not enough for a work to be recognized as high-quality art, it also should be representative of the time period it comes from.* ([dw.de](http://www.dw.de/dw/article/0,,15933463,00.html))

In my eyes, this is a great story and although preserving street art works against the temporary character of street art, this Leipzig precedent could open more possibilities for artists to become more accepted in common opinion. It’s a perfect chance - we just need to use it!

Via Mazi Kretzschmar, thx!