Graffiti

Le livre

Brassaïs interest in graffiti began in the early 1930s. He published photographs of carvings found on the walls of the French capital, accompanied by a commentary, in a 1934 edition of the Surrealist review Minotaure, the first of numerous studies that he would complete in his lifetime. Graffiti seized the photographers imagination: he would seek out interesting inscriptions in the working-class districts of the city; he would spend long bouts in front of images waiting for the right light to take his photograph; and he would return to a specific piece of graffiti years after he first found them to record the effects of rime. But these often violently carved lines, holes and figures also captured him intellectually, leading him to explore the meaning and impulses behind this raw art form, tracing its origins from the cave paintings of Altamira to the lava-preserved etchings of Pompeii, from the French Revolutionary scribbler, Restif de la Bretonne, to, the walls of modern-day Paris.Brassaïs texts celebrate the primitive forces in play in the act of defacing a wall and the magical power of the symbols inscribed. Graffiti becomes a primal gesture, its symbols a distillation of all life - from birth, through love, to death. This interpretation bad an enduring influence on the work of artiste such as Miro, Dubuffet, and Tapiés - who ail found affinities between the canvas and the wall - and at the same lime laid the early foundations for the popularization of graffiti as an art form that occurred in the last decades of the twentieth century.The current publication reproduces a comprehensive selection of Brassaï’s photographs of graffiti along with facsimile pages from Brassaï’s graffiti sketchbooks, extracts from his conversations with Picasso on the subject, and several essays by Brassaï’s published here in English for the first rime. An essential volume in the artists corpus of works, Graffiti demonstrates the extraordinary prescience and freedom of thought (...)