Street Art: Where Paris's Walls Became Its Biggest Galleries

Paris's street-art scene grew out of the postering and stencil culture that took hold in the 1980s, concentrated especially in the 13th arrondissement's Butte-aux-Cailles and in Belleville, where large-scale murals began appearing legally in the 2000s through city-sanctioned projects on tower-block facades. What started as an underground, often illegal practice has become one of the most official forms of public art in the city — entire building facades are now commissioned the way a museum might commission a sculpture. Nowhere is this clearer than in the 13th arrondissement, Paris's best-known open-air mural district. Since 2014 the Itinerrance gallery's Boulevard Paris 13 project has brought roughly 35 monumental murals by more than 30 artists from about 12 countries to its tower blocks, with up to 26 giant works on boulevard Vincent Auriol alone. On that boulevard look for Shepard Fairey (Obey) at no. 141, D*Face at no. 155, Cryptik at no. 171, Inti at no. 81 and Seth, whose “Enter the Vortex” is pictured here. Elsewhere in the district, Bordalo II's beaver is at 87 rue du Chevaleret and Roa's giant cat is on rue Thomas-Mann by the Jardin Abbé-Pierre, with more pieces along rue Jeanne d'Arc, rue Jenner and boulevard Masséna.

Follow a self-guided mural route through the 13th arrondissement's high-rise facades, painted by internationally known artists on a scale that dwarfs anything in the historic center, or wander Belleville's backstreets for smaller stencil and paste-up work that changes from year to year, sometimes month to month. Street art is the one Paris attraction where the sights are genuinely temporary: what you see today may be painted over by your next visit.

In the 13th arrondissement, start on boulevard Vincent Auriol and follow rue du Chevaleret and rue Jeanne d'Arc to Place Pinel, where C215's “Papy Dance” fills the wall at no. 9, then climb to the Butte-aux-Cailles for smaller works. In Belleville, rue Dénoyez is a living gallery, repainted again and again by local artists and collectives.

The French street artist known as Invader has hidden small mosaic "Space Invaders" across Paris since the late 1990s — spotting them has become a local pastime, with an official app that tracks how many you've found, turning the whole city into a low-stakes scavenger hunt. The elusive artist C215 is often called the "Parisian Banksy" for his stenciled portraits of the city's homeless residents and children, painted with a tenderness his nickname doesn't quite capture.

More from the history books

Modern Paris street art has roots in May 1968, when students covered the city's walls with posters and slogans. Stencil art arrived in the early 1980s: Blek le Rat, the pseudonym of Xavier Prou, began spraying life-size rats on Parisian walls in 1981 and is widely regarded as a founding figure of stencil graffiti, whose influence Banksy has acknowledged. Around the same time, Jérôme Mesnager began painting his white, dancing silhouettes, the "Corps Blancs," around Ménilmontant in 1983, and Miss.Tic began stenciling her poetic, wry slogans alongside portraits of women.

The 13th arrondissement's turn came in 2013 with the Tour Paris 13 project, in which a condemned tower block on avenue de Choisy was handed over to more than a hundred artists, each transforming an apartment or stairwell before the building was demolished. Tens of thousands of visitors queued to see it in the weeks it was open, a sign of how far street art had moved from the margins of Paris into the heart of its cultural life.