In brief
- A major retrospective dedicated to Jacques Villeglé from 14 October 2026 to 14 February 2027 at Musée Carnavalet.
- A journey celebrating the centenary of the birth of the artist, a pioneer of Nouveau Réalisme.
- An exploration of the Parisian street through posters taken from four iconic districts of the capital.
- An unprecedented dialogue between Villeglé’s work and the creations of contemporary street artists.
From 14 October 2026 to 14 February 2027, Musée Carnavalet will present the exhibition Paris à l’arraché, a major tribute celebrating the centenary of the birth of Jacques Villeglé. Reading the street as a collective work, this major Nouveau Réalisme artist transformed the urban ephemeral into an historical archive of the capital. Through his famous lacerated posters, removed and then mounted on canvas, a poetic archaeology of Paris emerges, enriched by unpublished documents and a captivating dialogue with contemporary creation.
The exhibition in detail BR· Venue: Musée Carnavalet · Histoire de Paris (Paris 3rd arrondissement)BR· Dates: From 14 October 2026 to 14 February 2027BR· Featured artist: Jacques Villeglé (1926-2022)BR· Curators: Valérie Guillaume, Émilie Gandon and Jennifer HeimBR· Price: €15
A sanctuary for the memory of Paris: Musée Carnavalet
The choice of Musée Carnavalet to host this celebration is no coincidence. Dedicated to the history of the capital from its earliest origins, this architectural setting located in the heart of the Marais is a privileged witness to the city’s transformations. The museum’s collections contain an impressive quantity of objects, paintings, sculptures and signs that tell the story of Parisians’ daily lives through the ages. Jacques Villeglé’s posters fit organically into this desire to preserve urban heritage, echoing the buried memories and visual narratives that accumulate on the capital’s walls.
Walking through the historic rooms of this major institution in the third arrondissement of Paris, visitors can appreciate the subtle transition between documented history and history captured on the spot. The exhibition’s curators, Valérie Guillaume, Émilie Gandon and Jennifer Heim, have designed a itinerary where the artist’s work resonates intimately with the topography and museography of the venue. The selected pieces illustrate the way in which the Parisian street produces its own iconography, a popular, commercial or political imagery that time and the elements continuously transform.
A poetics of popular tearing
Jacques Villeglé’s practice is based on a radical gesture of taking art from where it is spontaneously created, namely in the public space. The tearing of superimposed posters is not the product of arbitrary destruction, but the reflection of a true popular poetics. Each tear, each scrap of paper torn off by an anonymous passer-by, offers a glimpse of an older layer, creating a unique temporal superposition. This immediate archaeology of the city highlights the aesthetics of chance and sedimentation. By extracting these accidental compositions from their initial wall support to transpose them onto canvas, the artist immortalises the impulses of collective life, advertising slogans, the faces of public figures and the political demands of an entire era.
The posterity of a pioneer of Nouveau Réalisme
Jacques Villeglé passed away in 2022, but his work remains of absolute modernity. Arriving in Paris in 1950, this native of Quimper quickly established himself as a flâneur attentive to the hoardings of reconstruction. With his accomplice Raymond Hains, he perceived a raw beauty in the layers of commercial and political posters, shaped not by the artist himself, but by the anonymous gestures of passers-by. This concept of the “Lacéré anonyme” (anonymous torn poster) redefined modern art by elevating urban debris to the rank of a pictorial masterpiece, carefully mounted on canvas without alteration by the artist.
This innovative gesture is fully aligned with the dynamics of Nouveau Réalisme, a major artistic movement that advocated a return to reality through the direct appropriation of everyday objects. Unlike lyrical abstraction or academic art, the new realists chose to make the city their studio and its waste their raw material. Villeglé saw building site hoardings and billboards as true living paintings. His approach is distinguished by a constant refusal to intervene pictorially on the retrieved posters. His role was to select, detach, frame and fix this collective creation onto a canvas in order to grant it the status of a work of art and an invaluable historical archive.
Four districts to map memory
Jacques Villeglé’s work resembles a sensitive and geographical mapping of Paris. The collection of posters was not done in a haphazard manner, but followed a precise itinerary through strategic areas of the capital. Each district explored by the artist possessed its own visual identity, its own political, artistic or commercial themes. By focusing on four well-defined sectors, the exhibition highlights the sociological and cultural diversity of the city. The posters collected in these districts reveal the concerns of a society undergoing rapid change, capturing the very essence of the Parisian spirit throughout the post-war decades.
A journey through the capital’s districts
The exhibition route will guide the visitor through Villeglé’s favoured territories: Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Montparnasse, Porte Maillot and Le Marais. Each retrieved work obeys a strict protocol, associating a street name and a precise date, in the manner of the famous painting Seine/Jacob, septembre 1964. These colourful and torn compositions become precious documentary archives of the political tensions, electoral campaigns and revolts that shook post-war French society.
Each selected district corresponds to a distinctive facet of the city’s memory. In Saint-Germain-des-Prés, intellectual, literary and artistic effervescence dominates, reflected on the walls by announcements of galleries, jazz concerts and book publications. Around Montparnasse, the atmosphere preserves the memory of successive waves of bohemian artists and constantly evolving grand boulevards. Porte Maillot, with its vast construction sites and major infrastructure transformations, offers a striking testimony to the galloping modernisation of the metropolis. Finally, Le Marais, the district where Musée Carnavalet itself is located, reveals a more intimate aesthetic, characterised by a network of ancient alleys where heritage history and the changes of the late twentieth century intertwine.
A sensitive dialogue with contemporary urban art
Jacques Villeglé’s legacy is not limited to the preservation of the past; it also forms part of a direct lineage with contemporary artistic practices. The exhibition aims to highlight this continuity by establishing visual and thematic parallels between the lacerated posters of the mid-twentieth century and the current interventions of street creators. This cross-perspective makes it possible to understand how public space remains, even today, a laboratory of forms, colours and political ideas in perpetual reinvention.
Contemporary street art as a legacy
The aesthetic confrontation of the exhibition extends to contemporary expressions of street art. While Jacques Villeglé amused himself by doing the exact opposite of today’s graffiti artists by removing from the street what the latter add to it, the artistic connections were very real. The collaboration with the graffiti duo Lek & Sowat perfectly illustrates this intellectual lineage. The tour highlights how the street remains the fertile ground for this transgenerational aesthetic transmission, enriched by immersive audio and audiovisual archives.
Contemporary street artists share with the pioneer of Nouveau Réalisme a fascination for the ephemeral, the accidental and the visual impact of the graphic message in the city. The exhibition explores this fascinating duality between the act of subtracting, unique to Villeglé who tore material from the urban wall, and the act of adding, characteristic of today’s graffiti artists and poster paste-up creators. Through interactive displays, photographs and unpublished testimonies, the tour demonstrates that, despite opposing material approaches, the quest for a visual poetry rooted in daily reality remains the common thread linking these generations of artists.
The materiality of the ephemeral: from street paper to museum canvas
The technical and physical dimension of Jacques Villeglé’s work constitutes a fundamental aspect of his oeuvre. Poster paper, by its fragile and perishable nature, suffers the aggressions of weather, pollution and sun. Marouflage on canvas, a meticulous method employed by the artist, allows this material fragility to be fixed in time without smoothing out its reliefs or altering its original textures. Visitors will be able to observe closely the thickness of the accumulated layers, the mattness of period printing inks, the roughness of tears and the traces left by the original glue.
These material details transform each work into a three-dimensional, almost sculptural art object. The way the paper peels, creases and tears creates a play of light and shadow that can only be fully appreciated during a physical confrontation with the work. The exhibition particularly highlights this tactile dimension, inviting the public to observe the microscopic details of the paper fibres and the graphic accidents that give each composition its unique and irreplaceable character.
Why the exhibition Paris à l’arraché captivates
Visiting this exhibition in the heart of Le Marais offers a double resonance, as Musée Carnavalet itself holds a rich collection of historic posters. Extended by a book published by Éditions Paris Musées, this event invites us to take a fresh look at our urban daily life. To secure access to this unprecedented journey through time, booking in advance on the official platform is highly recommended, while the museum’s permanent collections remain accessible free of charge to extend your Parisian stroll.
The event stands out as a rare opportunity to rediscover the capital through the lens of its own visual, media and political history. By bringing together an exceptional body of works, fascinating archival documents and an enriching dialogue with the contemporary scene, Paris à l’arraché celebrates not only the memory of Jacques Villeglé, but also the inexhaustible vitality of Paris’s walls. It is an invitation to slow our pace during future metropolitan strolls, in order to pay new attention to these lacerated posters which, under the effect of time and chance, continue to write the collective history of our public space.
