On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Jacques Villeglé (27 March 1926, Quimper – 6 June 2022, Paris), the Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris presents the exhibition Paris à l'arraché. Jacques Villeglé et l'art urbain.
In 1950, Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé settled in Paris. For nearly fifty years, the artist made the capital his field of exploration, the material and main subject of his creations.
How? By collecting torn posters, visual markers inseparable from Parisian identity since the 18th century. Wandering through the streets, he "seized the real", both its materiality and its poetry. Jacques Villeglé declared: "What is important to me is that all the posters collected have a designation: the name of the street and the date of collection (…) it was to tell the story of the streets of Paris".
The exhibition invites visitors to follow the artist on his Parisian wanderings. Sensitive and immersive, it offers a journey into the history of the city, through the layers of posters revealed by the tears made by anonymous passers-by. The itinerary also explores the many and varied links between Villeglé and the contemporary urban art scene. Unprecedented in its approach, the exhibition is also unprecedented for the large number of documents and works presented for the first time