Le Bateleur was a very talented street artist who diedyoung, in his early thirties, in 1996. Like many of the greats of Paris pochoir art, such as Nemo, he came from the poor 20th arrondissement of Paris, in his case Menilmontant. When he was 3, with four brothers and sisters, his mother died and his father, a service-station attendant, lost the plot and neglected his children, who soon ran wild in the streets. His grandmother tried to help but when she died, the children were taken from their father. At the age of ten, Le Bateleur was put in a children's home, where he spent the next 8 years. It was, as he said in an interview(you can see it on http://www.chris-kutschera.com/) fine materially but emotionally a disaster which affected his whole life. He left at 18, in revolt at society and soon fell into drugs and crime, eventually ending up going to prison for 3 years. He'd always loved art and was always drawing but was not encouraged to do so--at the home he was trained as a cook. A love affair in which his girlfriend had his child encouraged a new beginning, and he got off the drugs and put his life back on track. He did all sorts of things, ran a bar in Marseille, went to live in the Antilles Islands, but on coming back to Paris decided to start creating street art.
He took the name Le Bateleur--which he'd used from the age of 15--because it was the Tarot figure that kept coming up in the readings he did. (Le Bateleur in French is the Tarot figure known in English as the Magician--traditionally on French Tarot cards he's depicted as a street magician.) Le Bateleur's striking pictures, mixed with text, started to make their impression on the walls of Paris but though the artist started to become more famous, he didn't give up on his ideals of simplicity and a refusal to cave in to what he saw as a twisted society's lack of care for human beings, and its concentration on status and money. When he did sell artworks, he never asked for much money, and very often he would give them away. And of course his street art was freely created..Poor, still living in a squat and battling bravely for his living, Le Bateleur epitomised the rebellious, suffering figure of the artist. His untimely death robbed street art of one of its most amazing figures. RIP, Le Bateleur. You are sadly missed.
In 1997, a year after Le Bateleur, fellow street artist and friend Nemo created a tribute work to his memory. You can see it at the top of this page(the other three are works by Le Bateleur).
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