Like the caveman singing at the sight of the impression of his hand on a rock, these young people feel triumph at the sight of their graffiti. Dondi White makes the same kind of comparison in his first pictures in 1983. Does the impression left by the prehistoric artist not have something prophetic about it? Does it not announce, from a dark grotto, that man will survive? Does it not indicate that history will be reborn in the original form of graffiti, also painted by artists working in the night and expressing, in this way, their aspirations to a new world order?
Over the years (1968-1980) all kinds of styles of imaginative decoration emerged in the field of “tags”. Realism and Romanticism co-existed in the light of the existence of enemies and obstacles such as the police, stool pigeons, various gangs, wolves, dogs, the huge fences and the cleaning installations threatening both the graffiti creator and his work.
So it is not surprising to note that the graffiti-writers move out of the stage of being students, disciples or masters to become a prince or king of subway art and street art. It is also obvious that it is only one more step to become an artist. Art, after all, is above all a pictorial representation of consciousness.
This definition began to appear for the first time at the end of the 1970’s and the start of the 1980’s and it’s just as important in the history of art – which after all aims at humanizing the world – as Marcel Duchamp when he turned a urinal into a work of art, shocking the world.
The New York Graffiti movement was like a bomb thrown into the art world. Few genres have managed to attract so much media attention and the discussions surrounding the movement persisted. Various films, books, newspaper articles and items in the official art reviews have concerned themselves with the debate. In the television film “Wild Style”(1981), graffiti is portrayed as a kind of total art, with train spray can art, break dancing, hip hop- and rap music constituting an invisible whole.
The graffiti movement made it’s appearance in Europe as an artistic movement in 1983 when the Yaki Kornblidt Gallery displayed the first graffiti pictures.
Well known dutch collectors bought a large number of splendid graffiti works by artists like Rammellzee, Blade, Quik, Futura 2000, Bill Blast, Crash, Dondi White, Seen and Zephyr.
It was an exciting time. The enthusiasts fought over the best pictures and all the 1983 and 1984 exhibitions sold out. The prices followed along with the trend.
The museums quickly took an interest in graffiti and Wim Beerens, who was director of Rotterdam Boymans-van Beuningen museum, and Frans Haks, director of the Groningen Museum, bought various works.
In 1983 Wim Beeren organized the first large-scale official exhibition about the New York Graffiti movement for the Boymans museum and it attracted 25.000 visitors, mostly very excited. The catalogues and the admission tickets were sold out at a blink of an eye. The public delighted in the vivid and twinkling colours, the movement, the aesthetics and the rhythm of those very expressive paintings.
The Groninger Museum took over the show and over 40.000 visitors took the show in. The works of Koor, A-One and Toxic were not part of the shows, because those artists were not really known in The Netherlands, but this is now recognized as a mistake.
The enthusiasm spread to Germany when the well-known collector Ludwig purchased some of the artists’ works and graffiti made a tour of German museums.
In 1986 the Groninger Museum organised the first exhibition dedicated to Rammellzee and 3.000 visitors stormed the museum at the opening and some paintings had to be temporarily withdrawn from the exhibition. The four week show attracted 10.000 people.
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