American Graffiti. Margo Thompson

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      In December 1979, the first exhibition of graffiti art in Europe opened at the Galleria la Medusa in Rome, called The Fabulous Five: Calligraffiti di FREDerick Brathwaite, LEE George Quinones. Bruni in his catalogue essay argued for the importance of graffiti, as the authentic visual idiom of working class and minority populations of the urban ghettoes, as part of an art historical tradition, and as utterly American in its attitude. He compared graffiti to the blues and jazz in its expressive force, writing that it is ‘undoubtedly the spontaneous pictorial expression of the new black generation’ and of young people from ‘Harlem, Brooklyn, [the] Bronx, East New York, [and] New Jersey’. Like the earlier forms of popular music whose ‘musical messages of lament and protest… emerged from the ghetto to conquer the world’, graffiti was also on track to ‘draw attention’ to the disenfranchised. He drew parallels between this exhibition and the breakthrough of other important American artists who had spent time in Rome, Robert Rauschenberg in 1953 and Cy Twombly in 1957. The allusions were deliberate, as Rauschenberg, with Jasper Johns, was a forerunner to Pop Art in his use of commercial imagery and objects in his paintings and Twombly had used both calligraphic marks and proper names that art critics compared to graffiti. Bruni wrote, ‘the Fabulous Five are the natural, spontaneous result of the fusion of American pop-art and people’s innate desire to leave their mark by means of graffiti’.