64 pages 27 x 21 cm Language: French, English Paperback Publisher: Cornette de Saint Cyr 2012
The sale was organised by Cornette de Saint Cyr with Maurice Grinbaum and the Maquis-art shop and gallery at 42 rue Quincampoix — at the time the reference point for French graffiti online — and formed part of Les Florilèges, the series of fourteen prestige sales the house staged across the whole of the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild between 1 and 5 April 2012, a neoclassical listed mansion it had taken on after losing the salons of Drouot Montaigne. The centrepiece was a Seen canvas over five metres long from a London private collection, carried at 50,000–60,000 €. The catalogue runs full lot notes and artist biographies: the Taki 183 entry, for instance, rehearses the messenger's route through Washington Heights and the July 1971 New York Times piece that made him a name.
Auction catalogues from this moment are the paper trail of graffiti's arrival on the French secondary market — estimates, provenance lines, and the vocabulary the trade was still assembling to describe the work. They were printed to the size of the bidding room and discarded once the results were in.
