Inspired by Zlotykamien's huge figures and punk graffiti, Mesnager was one of the first in Paris to paint illegally and life-size from 1983 onwards. His white, mannequin-like figures can still be seen everywhere in the Paris cityscape today.

Photo: Claire Videau.

The conceptual artist Daniel Buren was the first to create illegal artistic wheatpaste works, later called paste-ups. He always used vertical, colored, and white stripes.Photo: Bernard Boyer, Paris. © Daniel Buren / Adagp, Paris. Detail.

Pignon-Ernest pasted prints a dead communard on sites associated with freedom struggles, such as Paris Commune locations, the Seine quays or the Charonne metro station. These were places of resistance ante 1945 or sites where police massacred Algerian War opponents in the 1960s.

Photo: Ernest Pignon-Ernest.

From 1972 onwards, the Polish conceptual artist placed his name as a graphic symbol  multiple times in various actions in public spaces, for instance on postcards, clothing, etc. Passers-by in socialist Poland at the time were uncertain whether they were dealing with advertising or a government notice.

Photos: Jerzy Trelinski.

Villeglé brought torn-off posters into his studio to create decollages. Instead of assembling a picture from set pieces (collage), in a decollage parts of original pictures are removed.

Chalk graffiti drawn by children are visible in the background.
Photo: Shunk-Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust. The Getty Research Institute, L. A. (2014.R.20) Gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in memory of Harry Shunk & Janos Kender

The inclusion of street art/graffiti photos on record covers began with this LP. Prévert's language and Brassaï's graffiti have in common the reduced to the essential, the sometimes blunt language of the street.

Cover photo: Brassaï.

The photographer Brassaï declared anonymous Paris scratch graffiti to be art from 1933 onwards.  However, it wasn't until 1953 that he was able to gradually publish his photos in mainstream media and  to exhibit them from 1956 onwards.

Early use of spray paint in an art object carried from the street into the gallery. Hains belonged to the artist group Affichists, who are now considered street art forerunners because they saw the artistic in torn-off posters and spray-painted construction fences from the street and then exhibited them in art spaces.

Lender: Private collection.

This photo captures the earliest spray graffiti attributed to a street artist. His rounded creatures with empty eyes and hollow mouths, the head separated from the torso, usually in black or white, intended as “an appeal to the fields of death in this world”.

Photo: Archive Eliane & Gérard Zlotykamien, courtesy Galerie Mathgoth, Paris.

In addition to the posters that would characterize later street art and protest graphics, spray-painted slogans between politics and poetry received great attention here for the first time. The posters from 1968 used puns and pointed contrasts.

Photo: Evènements de May-Juin 1968. Occupation de l''école des Beaux-Arts. Paris, May 1968. © Georges Azenstarck / Roger-Viollet.

This last sentence of a text by the artist group Situationists, which was published tens of thousands of times for the student protests, was found spray-painted on walls - at the time a brand new medium in protest and art.

Photo: Jo Schnapp, photographie extraite de L'Imagination au pouvoir [1968] © Éditions Allia, Paris, 2018.

After Christo's Iron Curtain, Matta-Clark's cut is the second influential illegal sculptural work to have monumental proportions.

Photo: Gordon Matta-Clark, color photography, 109.2 x 109.2 cm. Estate of Gordon Matta Clark. VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2024.

Circa 1980 no other European street artist had more media coverage than Naegeli. His virtuosic spray figures were based on his political agenda. These police photos were used in a trial against him. Naegeli fled to Cologne/Düsseldorf. He continued to spray until sent to prison for 6 months in 1984, despite support from Willy Brandt and Joseph Beuys. Photos: Zurich City Police, 1978–79. Kunsthaus Zurich Collection.

First artistic illegal flyposter in Germany, Hamburg. Often incorrectly attributed to Rimbaud, this saying was found on postcards and posters in countless student shared apartments in the 1980s.

Photo: Klaus Raasch.

Designed by British graffiti character innovator Mode 2 (Maxime Nicoll, *1967), this record united German rap greats from the 1990s with a focus on Heidelberg. Zebster (Achim Walta, *1970), the Stieber Twins (*1972) and Torch (Frederik Hahn, *1972) were also early graffiti writers themselves. A photo collage in the record's inlay shows the four elements of hip hop: djing, rap, graffiti and breakdancing. Early European hip-hop pioneers were usually active in several of these areas.

The cover graffiti, designed by the New York writers Seen (Richard Mirando, *1961) and Duster (*1964), was often copied - for example by the Stockholm Graffiti Writer Speedy as early as 1985.[Jacob Kimvall] The most successful song on the record, Sidewalk Talk, was written by occasional tagger Madonna. John Jellybean Benitez was her lover at the time. She previously dated SAMO_© member Basquiat.

Jacob Kimvall Collection.

The upside down and “flipped” map of America is reminiscent of the 1950s TV dolphin of the same name. Coming from the San Francisco punk scene, Bauman also collaborated in New York with stencil graffiti artists such as David Wojnarowicz.

Fekner's first illegal, still apolitical stencil series consisted of past, [then] present and future years. Designed to be viewed from the car, it should bring back individual memories.

Lender: Ulrich Blanché

Kirchheimer (*1931) from Saarbrücken, who fled from the Nazis, filmed the material for this first New York graffiti documentary in 1977. Accompanied by a jazz soundtrack, the camera follows subways painted with graffiti, for example by Lee (Quiñones, *1960) or Daze (Chris Ellis, *1962). Kirchheimer contrasts the illegal graffiti with huge, sometimes more provocative legal billboards.

MOTA = Medicine Of The Angels [ Marijuana ]. " I don't think they were referencing the Mexican Mafia. In L.A. when we write the number 13 [in ABC = M] we are always talking about Marijuana. I think it a fun tag bragging about getting high, with a 'Beautiful Script'.”[Chaz Bojorquez].

Photo: Ben Lomas. Lomas and Weltman Collection, 1965. ©Susan Phillips.

Blades is so named because she stabbed her first friend. A year after she spray-painted her only tag ever, in the Cholo graffiti tradition, gang members derogatorily added Puta (whore) and La Loca (the crazy one).

Photo: Gusmano Cesaretti.

The article sparked a graffiti boom in New York. A little later, the mayor had to pass a law against graffiti. The article also appeared in Europe with a different title. This was perhaps the first time to read about style writing graffiti in Europe.

A rigid anti-graffiti policy in the city of New York focused on clean subways and in the 1980s pushed graffiti from the New York subways onto freight trains, on which they traveled across the country, sometimes for decades.

Photo: Sandra Fabara/Aileen Middel.

The most prominent female New York writer Pink painted freight trains early on. Here she collaborates with one of the first European female writers Mick. She comes from Groningen and has been active since 1983.

Photo: Sandra Fabara/Aileen Middel.

This Hall of Fame of famous writers existed for almost 20 years. Barbara 62 made early steps in the direction of larger, multi-coloured graffiti pieces. Phase 2, also represented here, brought significant stylistic innovations as a train graffiti writer.

Photo: Andrea Nelli.

This Lee graffiti train was the first of hundreds to be shot by photographer Henry Chalfant. He used it to develop his technique of photo frame-cropping graffitied train cars like canvases. Chalfant composed each photo from several individual shots taken parallel to the train car.

Photo: Henry Chalfant.

Hiphop impressario Frederick Brathwaite (*1959) aka Fab Five Freddy linked graffiti writers and street artists from 1980 onwards, first in New York, then internationally.

The back cover is part of a graffiti writer Futura 2000/Leonard McGurr (*1955) artwork, that links up with four other record covers all present in this exhibition.

The real first name (Lin Felton) of the writer, who started as a tagger around 1970 in Queens, New York, also appears in this Quik waggon. From 1980 he also designed canvases and exhibited in galleries.

Photo: Henry Chalfant.

This was Martha Cooper's first train graffiti photo. Like Henry Chalfant's she took a picture of a Lee train. Photojournalist and ethnographer Cooper photographed graffiti with a lot of context. The first documented Lee train cars date from 1975.

Photo: Martha Cooper.

This pioneer of abstract graffiti played an important role as a promoter of style writing in Europe. He sprayed and rapped live there during concerts by the punk band The Clash.

Photo: Martha Cooper.

The Clash sprayed punk graffiti and designed do-it-yourself punk shirts. With the cardboard stencil they refer to the guerrilla group Sandinistas, who overthrew a dictator in Nicaragua in 1979 - also with the help of political stencil graffiti. Banksy inspirer Robert del Naja started stencil graffiti partly because of The Clash: “I remember getting records from […] The Clash, they put stencils in their sleeves that you could use to paint on your clothes and all over the walls.”

The British political punks TRB were the first to include a cardboard stencil with the band logo as a gimmick with a record. Small print underneath read: "This stencil is not intended for spraying on public property!!!". In addition to walls, its size and motif were also suitable for clothing and hairstyles. TRB knew the Faust logo from gay rights publications.

The graffiti piece on the cover was designed by the European graffiti writing pioneers Bando (Phillip Lehman, *1965) and Mode 2 (Maxime Nicoll, *1967). Their crew CTK (Crime Time Kings) was the first European graffiti crew. This record includes an 8-page fold-out booklet with party instructions and non-alcoholic cocktail recipes.

Jacob Kimvall Collection.

The graffiti-inspired letters on Les Araignées Du Soir 's only record were designed by Epsylon Point [Étienne Lelong, b.1950], stencil graffiti pioneer and the band's guitarist. At times with his partner La Signe (*1948) he created multi-colored stencils with often explicitly sexual content.

For four years, this illegal two-car tribute to the murdered John Lennon traveled in tandem through New York as the cleaning staff refused to sand blast it.

Photo: Martha Cooper.

Like Crass, on whose label this record was released, the punks Conflict also made political punk stencil graffiti. Another one was documented in Jill Posener's 1982 book.

The punk and later hip-hop pioneer and Massive Attack musician Robert del Naja was inspired by the stencils on this record to do graffiti himself under the name “3D”. He brought Banksy to spray paint in Bristol, as the latter emphasizes in interviews.

Stay High revolutionized the early, often all-letter tags by adding his repeatedly copied character of a smoking stick figure, as well as other figural elements.

Photo: Matt Weber.

In keeping with the do-it-yourself principle of punk, punk zines not only discussed records and concerts, but also, as here, gave detailed instructions and copy templates on how you could spray stencil graffiti like Crass.

The logo of the anarchist punk band Crass criticizes symbols of power. It was also designed with the premise of being used as a stencil for graffiti.

Prominently published in the illustrated book Spray Can Art, which was groundbreaking for many European spray painters, this piece was painted by the leaders of the Paris and London scenes

Photo: Claude Abron.

As part of his “Autostoricizzazione” [self-historicization] project, the mail artist printed thousands of stickers. He promoted an imaginary exhibition in Venice on the occasion of his 100th birthday. The stickers were distributed worldwide from 1974.

Lender: Archive Center for Artist Publications in the Weserburg Museum for Modern Art.

The poster artist Staeck early on sold stickers that always went beyond pure political activism, as here with timeless, irritating messages.

Ulrich Blanché Collection.

The later internationally known conceptual artist illegally attached this very early proto-street art sticker to buildings at his art college and was subsequently suspended, among other things. Self-adhesive stickers have been around since 1935. They have been used indoors and outdoors, for example for advertising.

Lender: Archive Center for Artist Publications in the Weserburg Museum for Modern Art.

The Wild Style mural was designed by Zephyr (Andrew Witten, *1961), Revolt and Sharp in 1983 and is now one of the most famous graffiti ever.

Vampi is captured here removing sexist insults from one of her works at a club in Vondelpark, a typical Amsterdam graffiti location at that time.

The main character Raymond or Zoro is a celebrated but anonymous graffiti writer. The film describes his life and documents the then new interest in hip-hop culture among the media and the established art scene. Along with the illustrated book Subway Art, this film was probably the main inspiration for many writers around the world. On VHS, graffiti in the film was paused and copied.

Lender: Double-H Archive.

The article summarizes the West German graffiti development in Saarbrücken - from political slogans in the 1968 tradition (riot resistance, no nuclear power plants) to 1980 fun slogan graffiti (Sex, Dope & Anarchy is all we need in Germany) to the first style writing graffiti, where, among other things, graffiti films (Wild Style [1982], Beat Street [1985]) and records ( Scratch & Break [1983]) are cited.

Cool Candy, who started spraying in 1983, is one of the earliest German graffiti writers and, from 1986, became as CanTwo one of the most influential ones. Breakdancer Niels “Storm” Robitzky poses on top of a CanTwo piece.

Photo: Can Two.

This rare Vogelsang spray can was the standard graffiti spray can available in every hardware store in Germany in the 1980s. From around 1989 it was renamed Dupli Color.

Shortly after his arrival in New York in 1979, the Italian-born experimental filmmaker and graphic artist Franco Marinai photographed, among other things, SAMO_©- Graffiti that appeared in his 2024 Mah! Magazine in print for the first time. The graffiti signed _TM [trademark] forms a new-found subgroup of the SAMO_© slogans, in which Diaz and Basquiat saw themselves as an art guerrilla group.

Link:
MAH!© — AHEAD OF THE TEMPEST

This bilingual magazine from the US/Swedish branch of the Situationists was discontinued after this issue. It is one of the first times that style writing was featured on the cover of a magazine, the caption was simply: “New York, Trains and Houses”.

Mehdi El Hajoui Collection.

In a private letter from 1963, the Situationist leader Debord first claimed that he had created this famous graffiti, but he only made this public shortly before his death in 1993.

Colored black and white photo postcard, Edition Lyna, ca. 1965. Photo and inscription [Les Conseils superflus/superfluous advice]: Louis Bouffier. Mehdi El Hajoui Collection.

To this day, people go on a pilgrimage to this wall on Rue de Seine where there was this chalk graffiti in 1953. It was often quoted in the two decades after it was created and distributed as a postcard in several editions.

Black and white photo postcard, Alaph Verlag, ca. 1953. Photo and inscription [Les Conseils superflus/superfluous advice]: Louis Bouffier. Mehdi El Hajoui Collection.

The name of the founder of the first Saarbrücken crew sounds like Reseau, French for network. From 1988 onwards, he tirelessly expanded this network internationally beyond Saarbrücken and soon also legally.

This very opaque paint from Caparol comes from a wall paint manufacturer with a small range of spray cans at the time. It was more likely to be available in painting supply stores. Rarely used by graffiti writers due to the high price and almost always stolen.

Private collection.

Since this can could also be used on Styrofoam, it could be found in art supply stores. Prohibitively expensive at around 20 D-Mark per can, ultra opaque and with special, exclusive colors, the Marabu was actually only used for graffiti when it was stolen.

Private collection.

As Zéb, Jak was also active with punk stencils. JAK was a hip hop graffiti pseudonym of Stebut from Nancy, who was one of the most important Nancy hip hop pioneers and also worked as a musician and DJ.

Photo: Yvain von Stebut.

In Dieulouard (between Nancy and Metz) hip hop reached a teenager via TV shows and music videos in 1982, who later became MashUp. With Kafar he founded the UPK Crew in 1990.

Photo: ©MashUP.

The soon-to-be King Pin saw New York graffiti in the September 1983 issue of a German trade union magazine. In Cologne in 1984, he met the pioneering graffiti writer Lee Quiñones and then traveled to New York, where he met local graffiti writers. He became one of the first writers in Germany and also appeared in the influential US illustrated book Spray Can Art in 1987.Photo: King Pin.

Due to the great media interest in the Parisian pochoirists [stencil graffiti artists], they quickly became popular in smaller cities in France. This is an early example of a work in the greater region.

Photo: Christoph Maisenbacher.

Two generations of early tagging history are represented here. Small marker graffiti from Taki 183 are overlaid by larger spray tags - some from the same writers who were among the most prominent of their time. Phase 2 and Lee 163 ^rd are already interlocking their letters, Rat is relying on new pictorial gimmicks.

Photo: Associated Press.

Banksy spray-painted a live elephant at an exhibit in 2006 also as a tribute to Cornbread, who did so illegally at the Philadelphia Zoo in 1970. This presumably first graffiti writer wrote “Cornbread” on walls in prison to protest against the lack of cornbread. In 1967 he continued painting this word as a tag on the street. Before that, only gangs did that. Illegal urban guerrilla ego advertising was as new as its medium: felt-tip pens and spray cans had barely been ready for the market before.

Olivier's highly site-specific, unsigned floppy hat figures 1985-1995 were very well known in photos, postcards and book publications. Initially anonymous, around 1990 Olivier's works were the most published illegal street art in the greater region.

Photo: Christoph Maisenbacher.

This collaboration between Zéb and V2 was created in a left-wing punk graffiti context. Both were members of the punk band Yvain von Stebut et les Hémorroïdes.

Photo: Yvain von Stebut.

The article shows early, mostly anonymous stencil graffiti, which were seen a lot in the media from the mid-1980s onwards due to the popularity of the Paris Pochoirists.

Before Eiffe, no illegal felt-tip pen and spray can users are known by name in Germany. With the “felt-tip pens” and spray cans introduced in 1967, Eiffe was able to write slogans with unprecedented speed.

Photo: The Thede.

The great media response throughout Germany testifies to the novelty of Eiffe's slogan graffiti, which fluctuated in a humorously surreal way between politics and poetry.

Many of his graffiti “word surrealisms” (Eiffe) referred to the claim of the “court jester of the extra-parliamentary opposition” (Frankfurter Rundschau) to run for mayor: “Don’t be a pfeife [honk], vote for Eiffe.”

The photographer Jill Posener was one of the first to photograph and publish anonymous activist slogan graffiti around 1980, which was also dedicated to the rights of women, lesbians and gays, animal protection and anti-war efforts.

Photo: Jill Posener.

With the exception of this wall, from 1977 onwards, the anarcho-punks Crass - influenced by political post-68 stencils in Paris - only sprayed activist-poetic stencils on sexist or "exploitative" advertising posters in the London subway system. The photo became the cover motif for her record “Stations of the Crass”, the title of which alludes, among other things, to the graffiti campaign in subway stations stenciled by Crass.

Photo: Crass.

French street art pioneers pay tribute to Hambleton here. Shortly after their New York launch in 1981, his Shadowmen received international press coverage. In the twilight, they frightened passers-by and invited them to add their own eyes, feelers, horns, etc.

Photo: Jean-Noël Lafargue.

Since 1978, New York painter and street art pioneer Dan Witz has been creating self-authorized, illegal, anonymous interventions on the street, here a Dada-inspired poem: “I hammered about 50 words into the asphalt of Broadway.” Back in 1983 he published The Birds of Manhattan, an early street art photo book of his series with the same name.

Photos: Dan Witz.

The philosopher, experimental musician and artist Henry Flynt photographed the majority of the SAMO_© graffiti known today. No Basquiat museum retrospective or street art history is complete without them.

Photo: #26, Henry Flynt.

The British Gee Voucher (*1945) photographed the rough, military-looking stencil font of this feminist graffiti before she designed the covers for Crass, making a similar font a Crass trademark.

Photo: Gee Voucher.

25 years before Banksy, the Guerrilla Girls created street art in gorilla masks to protect their anonymity. They called themselves  the conscience of the (New York) art world and used “name & shame” to accuse powerful representatives of the art world of structural sexism.

Photo: Lori Grinker/ Guerrilla Girls, courtesy guerrillagirls.com.

This best-known work by the group highlights gender inequalities in museums that continue to exist until today.

Photo: © Guerrilla Girls, courtesy guerrillagirls.com.

Basquiat is one of the most expensive artists in the world today. He became known for his SAMO_© slogan graffiti - Basquiat's ticket to the art world, created with ex-graffiti writer Al Diaz. Shown here for the first time and recently discovered are ten SAMO© graffiti - each a poetic-critical commentary on the zeitgeist of the era.

Photos: Franco Marinai.

The environmental conceptual artist/activist was the first to paint monumental illegal street art in the United States. The classically trained Fekner collaborated with graffiti writers like Crash early on and recorded music. The song of the same name of the graffiti shown here, can be found on his album Idioblast.

Photo: ©John Fekner.

The skateboarder Soner in Metz was inspired to do graffiti himself by a Mode 2 graffiti piece on the cover of skater magazine Noway (January 1990).

Photo: ©Nesh.

The NY City Rap Tour, which brought hip-hop to Europe, sent an important impulse to the greater region. It combined all elements of hip-hop and presented dozens of rappers, graffiti writers, break dancers and DJs. The tour started on November 21, 1982 in Paris and then continued to Lyon, Belfort, Mulhouse, Strasbourg, London and Los Angeles.

Archive Le Republicain Lorrain.

Although practiced since the 1980s, this Brazilian form of graffiti was unknown in Europe until the late 1990s. Classic graffiti writing in Brazil is mostly legal and decorative. Pichação, on the other hand, is more of an illegal extreme sport with paint.

Photos: Os Gêmeos, Xplicit GrafX magazine.

Threat from the mayor to the illegal Pichação writer Juneca [Oswaldo Junior, *1973] and Bilão [Fernando Monteiro Júnior, *1974], published on the front page of the supplement to the official gazette of the municipality of São Paulo, October 4, 1988.

In 1973, 18 years after its first publication, in this article the poet, sometime jazz musician, former roommate of the late Charlie Parker and surrealist painter Ted Joans claimed that the famous New York "Bird Lives!" graffiti were specifically created by him.

Five Prévert paperback and record covers with Brassaï's graffiti photos appeared between 1945 and 1965, contributing to their popularity among a wider audience.

Book cover: Prévert and photo by Brassaï.

The simplicity and clarity of many of Prévert's poems are reminiscent of graffiti slogans on the street. Full of puns and surprising metaphors, they convey a catchy message.

Book cover: Prévert and photo by Brassaï.