Over the decades, illegal works by formative street artists were created in the Rue Visconti in Paris. This long, narrow street near Paris' art academy, and the area around it, could be described as the cradle of street art. For centuries, it had been home to famous artists and numerous galleries. With their 'Iron Curtain' consisting of oil barrels, one of the first illegal monumental sculptural works, it was Christo and Jeanne Claude who initiated illegal street art in the Rue Visconti in 1962. It blocked off the road, which was only four metres wide, as a reaction to the newly built Berlin Wall. The first artistic fly-posting artist Daniel Buren stuck up his conceptual paper works with vertical white and colored stripes here in 1968. In the 1980s, life-sized figures by Jérôme Mesnager and the 'first' street artist Gérard Zlotykamien appeared in the Rue Visconti. In 1984 Bando, the first French graffiti 'writer', left his 'tag' next to an early life-sized stencil by Blek le Rat, who inspired many French artists to work illegally on the street.