Jacques Villeglé is best known for his affiches lacérées (lacerated or torn posters), sometimes also referred to as décollages, literally referring to the process of unsticking that occurred when the artist ripped through successive layers of posters found on street walls and kiosks. Villeglé originally studied architecture but, after moving to Paris in 1949, began creating art out of these found, torn posters. He had his first solo show in 1957 and in 1960 signed the manifesto of the Nouveaux Réalistes (New Realists). These artists—including Arman, Jean Tinguely, and others—were reacting against the prevailing postwar vocabulary of expressive abstraction, known in France as art informel (literally art without form, often translated as lyrical abstraction), much as Pop artists in the United States were reacting against Abstract Expressionism at the same moment.
While Villeglé’s early affiches lacérées were typically dark in color and favored fragments of typography, by the mid-1960s he had moved to creating more colorful compositions in his torn poster works, with more figural imagery. The Little Extras of the Rue de la Gaîté is typical of his later work, which often revolves around sexual imagery. Starting in the early 19th century, the rue de la Gaîté in Paris (literally, Gaiety Street), near the Montparnasse cemetery, was lined with establishments of night-time entertainment—cabarets, dance halls, theaters, and the like–because the neighborhood was just outside the then-walled inner district of Paris, thus escaping the taxes imposed on wine and similar products when they passed through the checkpoints in the wall. Villeglé’s image, composed out of shreds of posters torn from the surroundings of the rue de la Gaîté, includes partial images of a female nude with a large (male?) hand cupping one breast, a couple who—based on the torn image of their foreheads—is likely kissing, and a poster that says “Pas comme elle” (not like her). The Little Extras of the Rue de la Gaîtéreflects the zeitgeist of the Montparnasse quarter of Paris in the 1980s.