Portraits for the People

“Ready…one, two, three!”

It’s 4:30 P.M. on a Thursday, and JR and Jerry Saltz are jumping. The French artist and the Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic bend their knees and bounce, striking a running-man pose mid-flight. Behind them is The Chronicles of New York City, a 32-foot-wide, 21-foot-tall black-and-white mural featuring 1,128 New Yorkers of every age and ilk, from movie stars to cops. JR spent a year photographing and interviewing each of them before digitally collaging their portraits into a single, sweeping New York cityscape.

Click-click-click-click. A camera flashes, and their landing thuds echo through the Brooklyn Museum’s Great Hall.

“Exactly,” JR nods approvingly.

“Wait—I have moobs!” exclaims Saltz, clutching his chest in mock distress. Laughter erupts from the smattering of people on Playboy’s makeshift set.

Today marks the first time the two men have met, but they have much in common. In addition to being New Yorkers, both are self-taught outsiders—Saltz was a truck driver until the age of 41, and JR usually prefers open spaces to white walls—who have become powerful insiders by insisting that art is for everyone, not just the people who flock to museums and auctions.

We’re here for a private preview of JR: Chronicles, the artist’s first major museum show in North America and his largest exhibit to date. Now 36 years old, he is best known for wheat-pasting colossal black-and-white portraits onto buildings, bridges and the surfaces of geopolitical hot spots around the world. From favela matriarchs in Brazil to a toddler peering over a U.S.-Mexico border fence, his subjects are usually people whose portraits you wouldn’t expect to see exhibited publicly, let alone at skyscraper scale.

The artist goes exclusively by his initials and usually dons shades and a fedora in public—an effort at semi-anonymity that ensures smooth passage across international borders. He also reasons that disclosing his identity would pull focus away from his subjects and the conversations their portraits can spark. (Saltz calls him an “inclusive version of Banksy.”)

The year 2019 was a big one for JR. In addition to unveiling the largest show of his career, the self-described “wallpaper artist” photographed Madonna for the cover of The New York Times Magazine and, in an astounding feat of tromp l’oeil, submerged the Louvre’s glass pyramid in a moat of paper and glue. JR: Chronicles, a 20,000-square-foot survey on view in Brooklyn until May 2020, spans 15 years of his career and marks the first time the museum has dedicated its Great Hall to a single artist. The aforementioned Chronicles of New York City, which includes an audio recording of each subject, is arguably JR’s most ambitious project yet. (You can hear each interview via the QR code that appears below.) Part love letter to New York and part Diego Rivera mural for the digital age, the artist calls his creation “a mirror of the city.”

However you characterize it, the piece brings to life one of the most resonant qualities of JR’s work: a multilayered expression of democratized art.

The day after a star-studded reception, during which the artist spent more time catching up with a local butcher than he did side-hugging Jake Gyllenhaal, JR and Saltz stroll the museum, going deep on the work and their unlikely paths to the upper echelons of the art world. Read on for a sliver of that hour-plus conversation, which touches on teenage arrests, the notion of “radical vulnerability,” grandmothers, Robert De Niro, the power of failure and much more.—Elizabeth Suman

SALTZ: Last night there were thousands of people here, from every walk of life. I saw Chris Rock. I saw Jake Gyllenhaal. But then I saw hundreds of people I never see in a museum—street artists, neighborhood people—and they were taking pictures and pointing at each other. And here we are, surrounded by a gigantic mural of the people and places of New York City that you’ve arranged. What is going on here?

JR: Like you said, it’s people. And actually, even if last night you saw some people who might be more famous than others—well, if they’re in this mural, they’re not bigger than anyone else. It’s not a group photo; it’s a group of photos, where no one person is more important than another. So Robert De Niro, who was there last night, he’s sitting on a stoop with other people, just blending in. And every single person here decided to represent themselves the way they wanted. I didn’t decide how they were going to be represented. They decided.

SALTZ: It’s like a mural of modern life for future historians. There are spectacular Renaissance murals in Venice and Rome, where painters were painting huge crowd scenes like this. Do you think of these as gigantic frescoes of a time and a place? It’s a living encyclopedia.

JR: Definitely. This is exactly the same thing, but the contemporary version of it, which is that you can listen to every single person and hear what they have to say. And those interviews are not conducted. It’s not like “How do you define yourself?” It’s “Here’s a mike; you say whatever you want to say. One day your grandchildren will hear it. What would you want to say?”

SALTZ: As a viewer, I can read or hear those interviews. But first is the optical impact. It’s almost beyond real—overwhelming, breathtaking, incomprehensible. It’s almost inhuman, like an insect-eye view of the world. How was this made?

JR: Well, it’s a collage, so actually it’s in the line of work I’ve been doing, because I’m a wallpaper artist at the end.

SALTZ: What’s a wallpaper artist? Is that bad?

JR: No! I unroll strips on walls. People think I’m a photographer. I’m not. Photography is just part of my process. I’m an artist who uses paper as my main subject, and I paste it.

SALTZ: There are lots of mini-narratives and dramas. It’s like 10,000 soap operas. There’s a group of B-boys and another of firefighters. There might be a painter or a sculptor working.

JR: Yes. People just reading, people hugging in the middle of the city. It’s a mirror of the city. I’ve lived here for almost nine years. Living here I had one vision of New York. But doing this mural is an excuse to go into every borough, into every neighborhood, and tap on anyone’s shoulder and say, “Who are you?”

SALTZ: Let me ask a specific question. There are about 25 people in the center sucking on long, long straws. What the fuck is going on?

JR: Well, that was kind of a metaphor for all the people drinking juice all day and all the green juice in the city.

SALTZ: Right? It’s insane. So that’s a comment about how people are always trying to be healthy or they’re busy. Are they sucking out our brains, mixing up the medicine?

JR: Yeah, it’s this mixture.

SALTZ: Again, when I look at any one person, I can’t really know if he’s a movie star or an accountant or a gangster.

JR: Yes. But if you click on him, you’ll have his name and his story—his story however he wishes to share it.

SALTZ: And then this makes me wonder.… You’re anonymous. I know you only as JR. You’re wearing sunglasses and a very stylish hat.

JR: Thank you. I appreciate that.

SALTZ: And incredibly good-looking. It’s a nightmare for somebody like me. And you have charisma, so that helps you with other human beings. But why anonymity? You’re a cult, but only as this unknown, masked mark-maker, like Zorro or Batman.

JR: This show actually helps me explain that. In a work like this, it’s no use at all.

SALTZ: They see your face?

JR: Yeah, most of the people saw my eyes, when I was in my photo truck.

SALTZ: You have peered over your glasses at me and then taken off your hat. Am I being seduced? What’s up?

JR: Whenever there’s a camera, I tend to put on the glasses and hat. The thing is, when I take them off, you would not even recognize me at the airport or in the street. You’re like, “I don’t know this person. Who is that?” Anonymity helped me when I did work at the Mexico border. It was possible only because I could cross the border and they would not recognize me. I can go to Turkey and to the Middle East, and each time I have to pass police control or borders, I take my hat and glasses off, and I’m just——

SALTZ: You’re another person. Secret agents and assassins blend in too.

JR: Exactly.

SALTZ: But in the world of art and museums and galleries and your work, you’re anonymous. Why?

JR: Well, because everything is connected. If a photo taken of us today is published without my hat and sunglasses, then when I’m at the border the next time, people will know my face. So I haven’t done a photo since I was 13 years old that I don’t have my sunglasses on.

SALTZ: Do you think if I knew that your name was “Jonathan Jones” and that you were from Holland that you would have trouble passing borders as a famous artist like this?

JR: Exactly. Look, when I did a project in Turkey, the city fined me. But they fined X, because they didn’t have my name. I had to pay the fines through the company I rented the scaffolding from. They could never stop me when I left, but they would have if they knew my name was Jonathan Jones. Same with the border.

SALTZ: Genius. You could transport drugs, actually. In my world, the high artsy-fartsy art world, everybody has a name. It’s stardom, the cult of the male star, in particular. You’re that, but you’re known only as JR. That’s another layer of anonymity. Or is it another type of fame? Why that layer?

JR: Well, early on it started with graffiti.

SALTZ: What was your name?

JR: Face 3, but I would actually write “JR” a lot. Face 3 was really the early one.

SALTZ: But that was just generic graffiti. I don’t like the graffiti where they’re just writing their names. The reason I don’t like it is that no one breaks out of the graffiti convention. Everyone’s work looks the same. Only the names are different.

JR: Exactly.

SALTZ: Then—and I don’t want you to be touchy about this—I think you took a thought structure that came through Banksy, where he’s very antagonistic to politics and economics, and you made that go gigantic. You took an idea of graffiti, broke the earliest, boring convention of name writing, combined it with muralists—Diego Rivera, as you’ve talked about. And then the paper; I think the paper is key for you.

JR: Yeah. Look, I wish I could say it in those words. It’s probably right. The thing is you have to go back to when I was 17. I knew nothing about Banksy or about Shepard Fairey.

SALTZ: Can you say what year it was?

JR: It was exactly 2000.

SALTZ: And was Banksy a god? No. He was just an English guy.

JR: Exactly. Doing graffiti too, actually.

SALTZ: I heard a rumor he went to an expensive art school.

JR: I have never been to art school.

SALTZ: Me neither. No art in my life.

JR: That’s why I love talking with you.

SALTZ: Art was for smart people.

JR: I think that’s why I came so naturally into the art world: because I didn’t even know there was an art world.

SALTZ: I have no degrees. I was a long-distance truck driver until the age of 41.

JR: I love that.

SALTZ: You started at 13?

JR: Yes. I’m 36 now. When I was 13, I started writing my name on the wall. When I was 16, a friend of mine came to me and said, “JR, I’ve got to stop graffiti because I think what we’re doing here is we’re a victim of a society of consumers. We’re writing our name every day like all those brands around us.” I was like, “Are you crazy?” Then it hit me, and I’m like, “You know what? I’m actually really bad at it anyway. I don’t even know how to make a colorful painting. It’s all the same.” Luckily for me I found a camera, but photography was a rich sport. Photography was not accessible to everybody, and that’s where I think if I was born 10 years earlier, there would be none of what I’ve done.

SALTZ: Because then you would’ve had to pay for film and developing——

JR: And travel. Low-cost travel arrived exactly in my generation. The internet arrived exactly in my generation. So I didn’t know Basquiat, Keith Haring.

SALTZ: You’re an outsider, untrained.

JR: Completely.

SALTZ: And that’s why you had to invent the entire process?

JR: To be honest, at 17, when I pasted the Champs-Élysées with my tiny photos [Expo 2 Rue], I thought I’d made it. I thought there was no other journey. My goal, as someone who grew up outside Paris, in the projects, was “I have to put my photos on the Champs-Élysées.” And I did it!

SALTZ: People like me, creatures of the high-art world, weren’t coming to your openings in the past five years. We’ve come only recently. What do you think of that?

JR: Well, for me it’s getting more and more exciting, because, like last night, I can merge—my whole goal is to merge. Merge the worlds without high-class, low-class, famous, nonfamous. When people gather there, they realize they all have something in common. They’ve never met; now they’re part of the same piece forever.

SALTZ: That seems like a big theme in your work. It isn’t like Banksy, who says, “This is very bad.” He’s very pointed and harsh in his critiques of society, income inequality or whatever. You are without commentary, in a way.

JR: Who am I to comment?

SALTZ: Many of your pictures are just groupings of people. Why are they black and white?

JR: Black and white started because I wanted to differentiate myself from advertising, which I hold a big stand against. I haven’t worked with any brand, any sponsor, any logo in 20 years—no Louis Vuitton, Colgate or whatever at the entrance of the museum.

SALTZ: So if I was Louis Vuitton and said, “I’d love you to make us a gigantic picture,” you would say——

JR: And you bring me $20 million, I still say no.

SALTZ: You would say, “I will make it for $20 million but no insignia.”

JR: Even then, I wouldn’t even start a discussion.

SALTZ: How do you make money now?

JR: Most of my work doesn’t make money. But one percent of it.…

SALTZ: Like a lot of artists.

JR: Yeah, 99 percent doesn’t make money, but the one percent makes enough to publish the rest.

SALTZ: You self-financed to get here and become this artist you are now.

JR: Exactly. I self-finance, or sometimes there’s a foundation or someone.

SALTZ: How did you self-finance 10 years ago?

JR: Even with my first project in the projects outside Paris, all my friends pooled some money. Each of them gave 50 bucks, 100 bucks. So I know I don’t need to have a 100-person studio in the most impressive building to be functioning. I know I can function with nothing, because I did it.

SALTZ: You have a real affinity for women, powerful women. What do you think accounts for that? I don’t want to ruin your anonymity, but does this connect to your mother?

JR: Yeah. I grew up living with my grandmother but also taking care of elderly women in my building, in the projects.

SALTZ: Would I have heard of the place you grew up?

JR: It’s a project a bit like the one where I took most of my photos, but another one.

SALTZ: Okay. So you were middle-class, roughly.

JR: Yeah, low middle-class.

SALTZ: So you have a mother. Did she approve of the JR entity when he would run around? Were you on drugs in those days?

JR: I never drank or took drugs, but I was into groups of friends fighting.

SALTZ: Did you fight?

JR: Yes, and I had a lot of trouble with the police at that age.

SALTZ: Did you carry a gun?

JR: No, but my friend did. Or knives. And I have to say, at that time my parents were really worried. One day, I remember the police called them, and they had to come pick me up in Paris because I was arrested for graffiti. My mom was like, “What did he do?” They said, “Well, he tagged on the wall.” And she was like, “Oh, and you want me to come all the way to Paris because he tagged on the wall? Well, you can keep him.” Boom. And so that day I was like, “Okay, I’ll find myself a passion.” Then I have a goal: My goal is to make that roof, however I get there. It’s to go into that tunnel, however I do it. And then slowly I started changing from the groups of friends who were just making trouble to the groups of friends who were looking to climb the highest building or TV antenna.

SALTZ: I think your work is changing right now. I think something’s going on. I know something needs to change so you’re not just this fancy-pants big photo-mural guy with a hat and sunglasses.

JR: Well, I hope to constantly be changing.

SALTZ: You need to be changing, because otherwise, like most graffiti artists—and you’re not that—they get one style and that’s it. That isn’t a good thing, JR. Are you boxing yourself in, becoming just another visual brand?

JR: But that’s why I directed a ballet. I made a film with Agnès Varda. That’s why I’m always pushing myself in areas I don’t know anything about, always.

SALTZ: Right.

JR: Because I want to fail. I think there’s nothing better than trying a project where there’s more failure than success. I put myself in this constantly, and I think that if not, there’s no point to being an artist if you’re doing everything the same that people like because it works.

SALTZ: That’s just product.

JR: Yeah, exactly. So I didn’t choose that journey to just repeat myself.

SALTZ: Samuel Beckett said, “Try again, fail again, fail better.”

JR: Exactly.

SALTZ: Well, wow, JR. This is an amazing journey you’ve taken. I feel lucky in a way—you don’t normally do press like this. What made you say yes to PLAYBOY? You’re not being paid; there’s no dough here. And it’s, um, PLAYBOY.

JR: You know, one thing I realized a couple of years ago when I stopped doing press is that I had so much more time. I didn’t have to wake up at seven A.M. to go to a radio station. I also realized that often you don’t have the space to talk. If we were talking for 10 minutes, however great you are in 10 minutes, it doesn’t get to the depths of the work. So it’s better that people don’t know about it. When I put my work on the street, it’s not even signed. It’s only the people who want to find out what it is who will find out. If not, they walk every day in front of a black-and-white image not knowing what it is. So the reason I said yes to this interview is really because we would have space, and also when I heard I could meet you and we could have this conversation.

SALTZ: That’s why I said yes, because I never interview artists. Ever. I always think I don’t want them to tell me what they think; I want to say what I think. You made your work, now I want to tell you what I see. And in your latest work especially, I see real art.

JR: Thank you. I could speak for hours like this, because for me, there’s no taboo subject; it’s about how deep you go.

SALTZ: No taboo. Radical vulnerability. Time to push the outer boundaries of what you can do now.

JR: Exactly.