Banksy's Lost Works E-Book

Will Ellsworth-Jones

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 139

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

In this richly illustrated landmark book, author and journalist Will Ellsworth-Jones documents the sold, stolen and destroyed works of Banksy, one of the most renowned and controversial artists of our time.  This is a book about what you can't see: the works that have disappeared entirely, whether destroyed by authorities or whisked into people's private art collections to languish on walls or in collector's vaults. These remarkable works are as elusive as their creator, but are returned here for public consumption and enjoyment. A victim of his own success, Banksy is famous the world over and yet more famously disdainful of the spotlight, preferring to remain anonymous. Considered by many to be one of the greatest living artists in the world and to others a rogue vandal with a political agenda, Banksy has scandalised and enlightened the art world since his acts of guerrilla art began to appear on the streets of Barton Hill in Bristol over 25 years ago. His artworks can now be found on streets across the globe, adorning the walls of some of the world's most distinguished galleries and even being sold for millions at private auctions.  Works unveiled in Banksy's Lost Works include: • The pieces painted on partially destroyed buildings around Kyiv, Ukraine, one of which has already been cut off the wall by a group of locals.  • Valentine's Day Mascara in Margate that has now been restored and housed in Dreamland after several interventions by Thanet District Council. • Banksy's disappearing rats, an early symbol of the artist routinely painted over by councils when the name Banksy was more synonymous with 'vandal' than 'artist'. This book, showcasing the often mysterious and occasionally mundane disappearances of works by one of the art world's more elusive figures, is a truly indispensable addition to the library of any Banksy fan. Sold, stolen or destroyed, discover Banksy's works that have disappeared from the wall.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

01

DROPPED WHILE SHE SHOPPED

LONDON

02

A COSTLY MISTAKE

LONDON

03

PARIS BANDITS

PARIS

04

TRAPPING AN ELEPHANT

SANTA MONICA

05

STREET FIGHTERS

LONDON

06

THE DOCTOR WON’T SEE YOU NOW

SAN FRANCISCO

07

THERE’S A LEOPARD UNDER THE BED

BRISTOL

08

STARS OF BETHLEHEM

BETHLEHEM

09

SEASIDE SHOWDOWN

CLACTON-ON-SEA

10

THE BARTERED WIFE

MARGATE

11

THE DISAPPEARING DIAMOND

DETROIT

12

LOVED TO DISTRACTION

BRISTOL

13

CRAZY CAR DOOR

NEW YORK

14

DODGING THE MINEFIELDS

HOSTOMEL

15

CRABS IN PERIL

CROMER

16

RAT NEEDS GOOD HOME

SAN FRANCISCO

17

NO BEATING ABOUT THE BUSH

LONDON

18

PEEL AND STICK

LONDON

19

BLINK AND IT’S GONE

NEW ORLEANS / LONDON

20

THE £800,000 STABLE

GREAT YARMOUTH

21

VANDALIZING THE VANDAL

LOS ANGELES / SANTA MONICA / PARK CITY

22

THE DEMOLITION JOB

HERNE BAY

23

MEDDLING WITH MICKEY

LOS ANGELES

24

THE LOST BOY

DETROIT

25

TREE SURGERY

LONDON

26

DOOR TO NOWHERE

GAZA

27

ESCAPE OF THE RAT

LONDON

28

THE OLD LADY OF FOLKESTONE

FOLKESTONE

29

OFF TO THE JUNK YARD

NORFOLK

30

KISS THE COPPERS GOODBYE

BRIGHTON

31

NO SAVING THE GORILLA

BRISTOL

32

A SHORT-LIVED VICTORY

LONDON

33

HELP! THERE’S A BANKSY ON MY WALL

NEW YORK

34

THE SPIES WHO VANISHED

CHELTENHAM

35

BEWARE SCAMMERS AT WORK

NEW ORLEANS

36

HOW SNOW TURNED TO ASH

PORT TALBOT

37

A PUZZLING PUNK

CROYDON

38

SMILING THROUGH

BRISTOL

39

THE ROWING BOAT VANDAL

BRISTOL

40

STOLEN SPERM

LONDON

41

THE SPHINX ALSO RISES

NEW YORK

42

NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH

BRISTOL / NEW YORK / LONDON

43

SEEN AND GONE

DOVER

44

EVERY BRICK IN THE WALL

LOS ANGELES

45

IN AND OUT OF THE BRONX

NEW YORK

46

MISTAKES DO HAPPEN

MELBOURNE

47

SKIP AND CHIPS

LOWESTOFT

48

SINK OR SWIM

VENICE

49

THE SAME BUT DIFFERENT

TORONTO / NEW ORLEANS

50

TEMPTATION AT THE BUS STOP

LONDON

51

NOTHING LASTS FOREVER

NEW YORK

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

During Banksy’s 30 years as a street artist he has sprayed all kind of surfaces, primarily walls, obviously, but also doors – metal, roller and wood – pavements, traffic bollards, road signs, cars, vans, lorries, tube trains, balloons, bridges, Nelson’s Column, Tate Britain, the National Theatre, skips, sheep, cows, pigs, one elephant, a farm gate, a boat, a beach wall, a breakwater, a model village, a cash machine, a water tank, a pub, a petrol station, a wheel clamp and a New York anti-graffiti sign, to list just some of his canvases. Yet today, sadly, very little of his work actually survives on the street in anything like its original form. He is a street artist whose pieces have gone absent without leave.

It has come to the point where even in his home town of Bristol, where he has painted 30 or perhaps 40 pieces over the years, Banksys are now few and far between. It is easy to reel off the favourites – Well Hung Lover, Mild Mild West, Girl with a Pierced Eardrum, and a couple more that are still there... just – but after that it is only in the safety of a school playground, a tattoo parlour and a museum that they have survived. And what is true of Bristol is equally true of other cities, like New Orleans, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto or Detroit, where his pieces have been and now are gone. London hardly fares any better.

So this is an unusual if not unique guidebook to the places where you can no longer see his masterpieces – and the sometimes incredible, sometimes laughable and sometimes sad stories of what happened to them. As Banksy says in Cut & Run, the book that accompanied his exhibition in Glasgow in 2023, ‘It’s got to the point where I’m not sure what part of this is the “art” any more. It doesn’t seem to be about the painting so much as events that unfold around it.’

Graffiti has always been a transitory art but with Banksy it has become something of a split-second art. Blink and it is gone. Of course, in his early days he faced council clean-up teams eager to exterminate graffiti despite whoever painted it. But today local councils tend to fall at his feet, taking pride in the fact that they have their own Banksy bestowed upon them. Now he has new enemies, different but equally effective. One set, the dealers, who take his work off the wall both to preserve it and sell it. The second set are other graffiti artists – not all of them, but some – who would never use a stencil and regard him an outcast, a ‘toy’ painting for the masses instead of his self-absorbed peers. They want to destroy his work, not sell it.

His problems with dealers began almost 20 years ago when he painted a piece of graffiti called WHAT? on the back of a stall on London’s Tottenham Court Road. The stallholder happily accepted £1,000 cash for the back of his stall. It soon sold again for £250,000. Banksy had been monetized and there was no turning back.

How sad. For he brings art, comment, laughter, a hint of something different to out-of-the-way places (easier to paint there) which need a bit of all that. I remember the joy of being among the crowds looking at and discussing his Slave Labour on the wall of a Poundland store in a slightly obscure part of North London – the excitement, the vitality of a mini gallery amid a everyday shopping street. And then it was gone, sold to America.

But it is also understandable. How can a painting by Banksy, protected by nothing but Perspex, sit on a wall in full view of every passer-by when other paintings by him are selling in auction rooms for millions? It is just not human nature to resist such temptation. Building owners and their agents will literally take off the whole side of a property if necessary to get to a Banksy. In Margate, for instance, where he painted a battered housewife on the end wall of a Victorian terraced house, they first had to take out the hallway floor and the stairs down to the cellar and up to the first floor. Only then, by dismantling the inner layer of the cavity wall, could they get to the back of the wall the piece was painted on. Then, the old grouting on the outer wall was replaced by cement foam to stabilize the bricks and this in turn was covered by a tongue-and-groove backing board. Next came the steel and on it went until the wall was in a fit state to be cut out. Of course, once the housewife had gone everything had to be replaced or rebuilt. The bill for all this, including security, transport and restoration, was £205,000 and counting.

Banksy has always tried to keep his pieces where he painted them by refusing to authenticate any of his work taken off the street. He set up the appropriately named Pest Control to separate fakes from the real thing, and Pest Control will not give any pieces that are taken from the street their stamp of approval. Without that stamp the big auction houses will not touch them. So even though he has announced the arrival of a new work on Instagram and often pictured it later in his books, they still will not get the precious certificate of authenticity. The slight risk that the buyer may not be getting the real thing lowers the price accordingly and on occasions makes a piece impossible to sell.

Originally, my own slightly muddled view was that Banksy was wrong and the owners of the wall and the dealers were right: if Banksy’s work is as good as I think it is, then it is worth saving for generations to come.

What changed me was a work on an isolated chunk of wall in an abandoned car factory in Detroit ‘rescued’ by a small, non-profit, art gallery. The wall it was painted on was soon to be demolished along with the rest of the factory, and the gallery saw itself as acting like a museum, preserving the Banksy for posterity. Yet five years later the gallery sent the wall to California for auction. Yes, the money was for a good cause, but Banksy’s wall was lost to anyone but the buyer and his friends. His street art is better left to live and die in the context in which it was painted rather than being treasured by a private buyer or preserved – however painstakingly – by a museum.

Stephan Keszler, who for a time was the go-to dealer for anyone having a wall to sell in the USA and made big money out of it, disagrees quite heatedly. ‘Eighty per cent of his works on the street have been destroyed by other street artists. I ask you: What is better, that the work is destroyed or that it is in someone’s house or a museum or a gallery? I have some pieces which are still in my possession. If I did not have them they would have been destroyed... What we did to preserve this work, you cannot even value it, it is unbelievable what good things we did. Thank God we were there and thank God we did it.’

Mr Keszler suggests 80 per cent of Banksy’s works have been destroyed by other artists, but actually as no one has kept a tally, no one knows for sure although it is certainly a very large number.

Some graffiti artists enjoy putting their own tag across other people’s work, a bit like a dog leaving its mark, and this is often the result of rivalries between graffiti crews, or else just jealousy. Others go over pieces because they want to paint the wall themselves – create their own ‘burner’ – and once they have painted it they know someone will come after them and repeat the process. It is simply part of life on the streets. But with Banksy it is different, and the difference is the venom with which they do it. They are not after a good wall to paint, they are after Banksy. Part of this, surely, has to be about pure envy at his success. But piled on top of this comes a long-running dispute with a prominent London graffiti artist, King Robbo, who died ten years ago. Banksy was accused of disrespecting him for painting over a piece of his which, remarkably for any piece of graffiti, had survived for 25 years. In return, followers of Robbo, or perhaps more accurately enemies of Banksy under the Robbo tag, are simply out to destroy him. In most cities around the world, if Banksy has been there, then sooner or later the Robbo tag will follow.

At the end of Cut & Run, Banksy says: ‘The canvases, the prints, all the “proper” art I’ve made doesn’t matter. Only the streetwork will last.’ Taken literally this would mean that soon there will be nothing left of Banksy. But I think what he actually means is that the street is where the heart of his painting is, it is the vital context, it is where it matters. Take his work away from there and it is a far lesser creature.

Going to the opening of an exhibition, put on by his former agent in Mayfair, I was painfully aware of the difference between street and gallery. On display were some of his works sprayed on canvas, where the images were often the same as those on the streets, only smaller. The first-night sun-dried tomatoes and ricotta, the bubbly and the raw tuna probably did not help, but these works just did not have the same impact or importance as Banksy in his natural environment – even though it is these canvases that make Banksy his money.

But at least the work on display was actually by Banksy, unlike the exhibition which opened at the ‘Banksy Museum’ in New York in May 2024, where there were 160 or so Banksys on the walls, but none of them by the artist himself. To explain: ten anonymous street artists had been hired to reproduce his work on the walls, and the museum came complete with noises from the street, hazard markings and police sirens in an attempt to give it the right edgy feeling. ‘It has been our goal to present the art in the way that is as close to what the artist originally intended,’ said the museum’s executive director. ‘We believe in the power of this art and that it has a spiritual quality unlike any other.’ Quite apart from the spiritual quality of this work, it is hard to imagine that Banksy could ever have dreamt that his work would be copied into a ‘museum’ all in the name of preserving street art.

Even trying to retain and safeguard his work on the street is problematic. In Venice, for example, there has been a fight over Migrant Child, a piece on the waterline of the busy Rio Novo canal, between those who believe it should be preserved and those who feel it should be allowed to fade away naturally, helped by the waves of passing boats.

Banksy now appears fairly phlegmatic about all such arguments, although it is noticeable that many of his key later works have not been graffiti but huge and very successful installations, like Dismaland in Weston-super-Mare, The Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem, or Cut & Run in Glasgow, where he retains total control of his work.

It would be impossible to cover every lost Banksy in one book but what I hope this guided tour will achieve is to document some of the key pieces that have vanished and the reasons – worthless or righteous – for their disappearance. As Banksy himself says, art comes alive in the arguments you have about it. Although he might hope that the arguments are about art, in many cases they are much more about money; but art, money or both, they are always compelling. Will his street art be remembered in a hundred years’ time? Yes, I think so, but it shouldn’t need a large chunk of wall carved from the street and expensively preserved in a museum for that to happen.

01

DROPPED WHILE SHE SHOPPED

BRUTON LANE, LONDON W1J 6QH

When Banksy painted Shop ’til you Drop impossibly high up an office building in London’s Mayfair, little could he or anyone else have imagined that it would be taken off the wall in one piece 12 years later to be put on the market with an asking price of $5 million.

The graffiti itself is a tribute to his chutzpah, his ingenuity and his skill with stencils. He painted it in broad daylight over a weekend. One Saturday morning in November 2011, professional scaffolders turned up outside the disused office building, erected the scaffolding, then finished it off with tarpaulin to cover the areas where Banksy was working. There was even some sort of ‘security guard’ protecting it. By 5pm on Sunday the scaffolding was gone, along with the security guard and all that was left was the Banksy on the wall.

The height of the building helps emphasize the obsession of the shopper, clutching her supermarket trolley whatever the cost to herself, and the shading he carefully created behind both the woman and her trolley makes it feel as though she really is falling. It is, or rather was, an amazing piece.

This height not only made the image work but serendipitously it protected the piece. Rival graffiti artists might have wanted to wipe it out but they were not going to hire the scaffolding needed to do so. It remained untouched and there were no tags from other artists that needed to be cleaned off.

When the building came down in 2023 (it is expected that a hotel will replace the office) the company demolishing it knew exactly what they had got and what condition it was in. They fitted a cage around the whole piece so that a crane could lift it off and take it into storage.

Now all that is needed is a buyer. Someone who has several million dollars to spare and room for a piece of art weighing just over 10 tons and measuring four metres square – probably the largest of all the Banksys to be taken off the wall in one piece.

02

A COSTLY MISTAKE

TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD, LONDON W1T 1AP