Jacques Villeglé and the Streets of Paris

About the Author\nBorn in San Francisco, Barnaby Conrad III graduated from Yale with a B.A. in Fine Arts in 1975. In New York he served as Senior Editor of Art World and Horizon, and Editor-at-Large at Forbes Life. In Paris he was a correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1982-87. Among his ten books are Absinthe: History in a Bottle (1988), Ghost Hunting in Montana (1994), The Martini, (1995) Les Chiens de Paris (1995), and Pan Am: An Aviation Legend (1999).\nIn 1949 an aristocratic bohemian named Jacques Mahé de La Villeglé 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 atélier”, says Villeglé, 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.