Graffiti on the Orient Express

As a teenager from the social housing estates in the Paris suburbs, the French street artist known as JR spent his teenage years with a spray can in hand tagging trains and buildings around the capital with his initials. Today, the boy from the banlieue often nicknamed the French Banksy, is sitting with me in L’Observatoire, the most expensive private carriage on the most luxurious train in the world, the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express on its way from Venice to Paris.

L’Observatoire has been redesigned by JR with the help of more than 100 artisans from across Europe; to stay in it costs an eye-watering £60-80,000 for the 26-hour journey.

“Trains have been the story of my life,” JR tells me. “I spent hundreds, thousands of hours in boring commuter trains going to and from the banlieue. I was tagging trains and roofs and tunnels. I just had no idea it was art. It was called vandalism and was illegal. That’s how it started and here I am.”

In L’Observatoire’s living area, panelled with hand-crafted wooden tiles, JR is making charcoal sketches of his next, perhaps biggest and most technically challenging project: to turn Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge spanning the Seine, into a 120m long 18m high inflatable fabric cave.

La Caverne, whose delayed opening date is yet to be confirmed, will remain for three weeks before it is torn down and the material recycled. The work is a tribute to the late Bulgarian-born artist Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude who “wrapped” the Pont Neuf in 1985.

Like Banksy, JR has cultivated a personal mystique. The son of a Tunisian mother and French father, he will say little about his family. He always wears a fedora and dark glasses, which means he is rarely recognised when he takes them off. Unlike Banksy, the 43-year-old artist does sign his work and give interviews.

After dropping out of school aged 15, JR – it stands for Jean-Réné – was working the dawn shift unloading at Paris’s fruit and vegetable market, with a pet pitbull for protection, when he found a camera in a forgotten bag on a suburban train at Charles de Gaulle airport.

He took black-and-white pictures of friends roaming the public transport network, photocopied and enlarged them and flyposted them on public buildings. “The local mayor sued me for degrading public property but he couldn’t take them down because locals liked them and said if he touched them they would riot,” he says. “My parents gave me a lot of freedom. They would be sleeping on the couch in the living room and they would just let me go out. You do what you do. I’d get arrested but the police would have to let me go because I was a minor.”

When French journalists asked JR to take pictures during the 2005 riots that started in those Paris suburbs, he refused. Instead, he created Portrait of a Generation, pasting large format pictures of youths from the housing projects over the walls and street furniture of his housing estate. “I took pictures of ordinary teenagers posing and pulling funny faces to counter the idea the banlieue was just full of youths who wanted to invade Paris and burn it down. And that’s when I decided to be an artist. I knew nothing about photography except how to press the camera button and still less about art.”

He called himself a photograffeur – a blend of photographer and the French word for graffiti artist. “My friend organised an exhibition of my work in a tiny gallery in Soho in London and a guy comes in and says he’ll take this and that. After he left, my friend said: ‘Congrats mate. That was Damien Hirst’. I said: ‘Who?’”

Since then, JR has worked with high-security prisoners, favela communities, refugee camps and the Louvre, whose pyramid he made disappear by wrapping it in giant images. In 2007 he made portraits of Israelis and Palestinians working in the same field and pasted them in pairs along the separation wall.  Ten years later, he installed Kikito, a giant picture of a toddler peeking over the US-Mexico border fence.  

When approached by the leisure company Belmond, part of the LVMH group, to put his stamp on the early 1900s Orient Express carriage that now runs between Paris and Venice or Istanbul and given carte blanche – artistically and financially – he sought out materials and artisan craft specialists from across Europe.   

L’Observatoire features a bedroom with walls lined with green leather scales, a skylight that opens like a camera lens, a brass high-sided bath tub, a library and a sitting room with a fireplace all under a zinc roof reminiscent of the Paris rooftops. The whole carriage took more than 100 people to build.

“It was all done with extreme attention and care because it will be there for generations,” JR says. He often visits the carriage when the train is in the Gare de l’Est and travels on the train regularly. For free of course. It is a luxury very few can afford, so I ask if he feels he has betrayed his teenage friends from the banlieues?  

“No, I don’t. One thing my parents taught me is to treat everyone the same whatever their social class, religion, background. I’m just navigating a different world. This is art and art should go everywhere. I was already happy just to travel, I didn’t need my own carriage.”

Illustrations by Oscar Ingham/Observer Design