Jacques Villegle and the Streets of Paris

In 1949 an aristocratic bohemian named Jacques Mahe de La Villegle was walking down the Boulevard Montparnasse in Paris when a billboard of shredded posters caught his eye. The colors and jagged shapes looked like an abstract painting. So he ripped them down, mounted them on canvas, and pronounced it Art. You see the street was really my atelier , says Villegle, now 95- years-old and still making art in Paris. His work hangs in every major contemporary art museum in the world and Paris’s Pompidou Center gave him a huge retrospective in 2008. Today he’s considered the precursor to street artists like Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Banksy.