Cave painting, which came to us from
deep antiquity can be considered the
forerunner of street art. Funnily
enough, there were no streets at that
old age. Modern street art appeared in
the United States. The first graffiti
images began to appear on the walls of
buildings and subway cars in the
1930s, but until the 1970s they were
single inscriptions. Those who made
them were considered hooligans, petty
offenders and troublemakers.
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They were treated as vandals,
smashing windows and worsening the
crime situation of a big city. A special
feature of street art was its unusual
venues. Streets and public places
instead of the silence of museum halls.
The most popular tool for street
artists was a spray-paint can, some of
them used stencils.
But there are more unusual
manifestations of street art -
installations and street sculptures.
In the late 1960s, there was a street
artist in New York who had the
pseudonym Taki 183. Working as a
courier, he painted walls in different
parts of the city.
In 1971, the New York Times
published an article about him, and
this fueled popularity of street art.
New York subway cars were
particularly desired objects for street
They didn’t usually limit themselves to
several cars but painted whole trains.
Finally, the city authorities allotted
certain places for street artists to
express themselves. The first graffiti
exhibition also opened in the 1970s. It
was then that street artists were made
lots of commercial offers.
And their creative potential has been
rising. Now, in addition to different
inscriptions, they draw cartoon
It became fashionable for tourists to
make photos against the background of
street art paintings. Graffiti began to
appear in Hollywood films as one of
the characteristic features of the
Street art amateurs were soon followed
by professionals. Such masters as
Jean-Michel Basquiat did not refrain
from making wide streets better. His
artworks are now sold for very big
In the 1990s, street artists became
actively involved in advertisement,
receiving orders from such large
companies as IBM and Sony.
PROMINENT STREET ARTISTS
Jean-Michel Basquiat is an American street artist who came to
prominence in New York City and
later worked in the genre of neo-
expressionism. From the late
1970s, he graffitied the walls of
Manhattan, and also played music
in the industrial sound band Gray in
nightclubs of the area. In the 1980s
he worked with Andy Warhol.
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Blek le Rat (Xavier Prue), a French
street artist, was the first to use a
stencil for drawing images. This
idea first occurred to him when he
was arrested by the police while
working on one of the streets. With
the help of stencils, street art
paintings can be created faster.
Since 1981, the frequent heroes of
his artworks have been rats, which
he depicts on the streets of Paris,
because he considers them the
only free animals in the city. He has
also created paintings, lithographs,
and artworks in the genre of silk-
screen printing and three-dimensional images.
Banksy is a British artist whose
identity is still unknown. He is
considered to be one of the most
recognizable street artists. Banksy
prefers to raise social issues like
poverty, child labor, war and peace.
At auctions, the price of his
artworks exceeds $ million.
STREET ART IN EUROPE
On the other side of the Atlantic,
the fashion for street art began to
spread in the 1980s. The most
famous art space of Europe in the
late 1980s was the Berlin Wall, or
rather what was left after its fall in
1989. One of its fragments has one
of the most recognizable street art
paintings - the kiss of Leonid
Brezhnev and Erich Honecker -
created by Dmitry Vrubel.
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In total, the ruins of the wall hold
paintings of 118 artists.
Another European street art center
is Paris. The French street artist
Blek le Rat has been decorating its
streets since the beginning of the
1980s, and populated Paris with his
rats that inspired his famous
counterpart Banksy. Thanks to him
Street Art became popular in the
But the social problems that yell
from his artworks are relevant for
all megacities of the world.
Shepard Fairey, an American street
artist, participated in the 2008
Barack Obama’s election
In Berlin, Paris, London, Hamburg,
and many other cities, tours of
places with street art paintings
have become quite popular.
The phrase of Jean-Michel Basquiat,
one of the representatives of this
genre, I do not think about art when
I'm working. I try to think about life
may become street art's motto.
Street art pictures for sale can be
found on the Jose Art Gallery