Banksy needles France with migrant mural blitz in Paris

Banksy-Napoleon Crossing the Alps.
Photo: Benoit Tessier/Reuters

Banksy needles France with migrant mural blitz in Paris

Banksy’s young black girl sprays a pink wallpaper pattern over a swastika on a wall next to her sleeping bag and teddy bear in an attempt to make her patch of pavement more cosy. 

The mysterious British street artist Banksy appears to have targeted the French government’s crackdown on migrants in a series of new murals in Paris. The world’s best known graffiti painter apparently “blitzed” the French capital over the last few days, leaving as many as six works on walls across the city. None of the works were signed — as has been Banksy’s wont in recent years — but experts told AFP that they look genuine.
The most political takes issue with France’s tough anti-migrant policy, with nearly 40 makeshift camps razed in Paris in the last three years and President Emmanuel Macron determined that the city does not become a magnet for refugees.
Rat Stencil Detail
Photo: Banksy on Instagram

Banksy: Fifty years since the uprising in Paris 1968. The birthplace of modern stencil art.

Rat Stencil
Photo: Banksy on Instagram
Minnie Mouse Remembering May1968
Photo: Instagram

One of Banksy’s trademark rats sits under the legend “May 1968” wearing a Minnie Mouse bow. The Disneyland Paris theme park just outside the French capital is now one of its biggest employers.

a rat flies through the air on a popped champagne cork
Photo: Benoit Tessier/Reuters

Other murals are more general meditations on greed or cruelty: In one, a rat flies through the air on a popped champagne cork; in another, a man in a suit offers a one-legged dog a bone, while a handsaw behind his back raises the grim possibility that it is the dog’s own leg.

Businessman in suit.
Photo: AFP
Napoleon Crossing the Alps.
Photo: Benoit Tessier/Reuters

Another mural reworked Jacques-Louis David’s painting of Napoleon crossing the Alps on horseback. The general’s red cloak, instead of billowing around him, is wrapped tightly around his face, in an apparent reference to France’s 2010 ban on face coverings in public places.

Bataclan Doorway Detail
Photo: AFP

An image of a woman veiled in mourning appeared next to the Bataclan concert hall in Paris Monday, the latest attributed to the mysterious British street artist Banksy. The stencilled mural next to the emergency exit from which hundreds fled the massacre by jihadist gunman in 2015, is the eighth apparently created by the artist in the French capital in recent days.

Bataclan Doorway
Photo: AFP/Thomas Samson

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