The birth of a movement
Though the origins of graffiti can be traced to other major American cities, this mode of expression gained its true momentum in the New York of the early 1970s, in the streets of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.
Unlike previous types of writing on public walls, New York graffiti exploded throughout the city, evolving and developing rapidly, before entering the art world to become a media sensation.
The first section of the exhibition traces the history of this cultural movement, from its beginnings to its global expansion and eventual recognition by the contemporary art world. It also presents some of the styles and techniques of graffiti writing, as well as the many key figures who contributed to its explosive development.
It all began in New York in the late 1960s. In a city on the verge of bankruptcy, teenagers began to write their names on walls and buses. Written with markers, and then spray paint, these signatures quickly spread throughout the city. This activity, called “writing”, attracted new followers every day.
Coming primarily from the working-class Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights, and later from the Bronx, and Brooklyn, they were for the most part between the ages of 14 and 16, and belonged to the Hispanic and African-American communities.
The movement began with the “tag”, meaning a signature consisting of a writer’s pseudonym, often accompanied by the number of his or her street address. Julio 204, Taki 183, and Joe 182, like many others, aimed to spread their name as far across the city as possible.
As early as 1971, in order to increase their visibility, writers chose the subway as their primary canvas. Initially, tags were confined to the interior of the car but, little by little, they found themselves on the train’s exterior, to be seen by commuters, pedestrians and most importantly, other writers. In order to distinguish themselves from one another, writers began to develop individual styles using original calligraphies for which they gained recognition.
The simple tag soon evolved into a large outline that was later filled with patterns such as polka dots, stars, and arrows. Paintings such as these, which could also include comic book-inspired characters, were sometimes called “masterpieces”. Later, the paintings increased in size to the point where they covered the entire exterior of the subway train, the first “whole-cars” appearing in 1974. Sketching in their black books, graffiti artists experimented with lines, shapes and patterns, carefully preparing the works they would paint on the trains. Faced with difficult and dangerous conditions, working often at night, in guarded train yards with little distance to view their work, the writers acquired great agility and a technical mastery of their medium. The stylistic approaches of great writers such as P.H.A.S.E. 2, Blade, Kase 2 and Dondi definitively left their mark on the movement, enriching it over the years with formal innovations.
The many documents presented within this exhibition—the photographs of Jon Naar, Henry Chalfant, Martha Cooper, and Flint Gennari, Coco 144’s previously unseen interviews with graffiti pioneers, the rare archives of Jack Stewart, and numerous films from the period—provide an exceptional account of this essentially ephemeral art form. The Fondation Cartier has commissioned three of the period’s most significant pioneers—P.H.A.S.E. 2, Part One, and Seen—to create monumental, large-scale wall pieces within the gallery space. These works, created specifically for the gallery space, reveal the significance of graffiti’s beginnings in New York, reaffirming the great vitality of the movement throughout its 40 year history.
Naissance du mouvement