The history of street art up to Bansky—four decades of trailblazing graffiti in Europe.

Graffiti has always been a wild, free, and ephemeral art form—from its origins in the 1960s through the photographs of Brassaï, who transformed graffiti into art, to the Sprayer of Zurich in the 1970s and the appearance of the first works by Banksy in England. This book studies the illegal roots of the art form with over 120 vandals from more than a dozen countries, tracing its journey to the dawn of the new millennium.

Where do the origins of street art and graffiti lie? In the far-flung region between Paris, Düsseldorf, and Zurich, European graffiti developed not in the gallery but outdoors, for the general public. Who were the pioneers of street art and concept artists who left their signatures in the rue Visconti in Paris between 1962 and 1986? What are the links between pop music, graffiti photos, and records? And who was Rimbaud, the queer revolutionary nineteenth-century poet to whom countless street artists referred? Find the answers to these questions and many more in this compelling story of how graffiti began.