Street art had a blast in the early 1980s with taking art out on public locations and grasping society’s attention not only with vibrant aesthetics, but more often with relevant content.
It is a one-on-one foolproof way to communicate immediate ideas to the general public, provoke and make art accessible out of the formal art-world venues and galleries, while actually bringing some colour and an occasional visual treat to the street.
Nowadays even more artists strive to share values and ignite love for art through beautifying traditionally dull public spaces as subways, public transport stations and whole building facades – a refreshing way to colour our strictly scheduled urban lives.
This graffiti and street art boom has brought to a wider, popular use and given a fresh connotation to the word mural. Mural is a borrowing from French, a transliteration of the French muraille (a wall). Mural is also any painting or art directly executed on a wall or ceiling and thus harmoniously and cleverly incorporating the given architectural elements of the place. Cave paintings are murals also, so muralism is quite an ancient art form – some cave paintings in France date from 30 000 B.C.
The first known usages of the word in the sense of a wall occurs in 15th century William Caxton’s (an English merchant, diplomat, writer, and printer, named among the 100 Greatest Britons) translations of The siege and conquest of Jerusalem and The history of Troy.
Interestingly, the Pope introduced the word into the text of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in his edition of 1728, giving the reading: “Now is the Mural down between the two neighbours“, although the modern editors tend to reject this as misreading and debate whether the mural was down or raised.
Mural – History
The term mural painting was introduced by Anna Jameson, in her Legends of the Monastic Orders as presented in fine arts in 1850: “A fragment of mural painting preserved in the Christian Museum in the Vatican”.
The recent promotion of mural paintings with social and political messages became mostly popular through the Mexican muralism movement, which started in the 1920s, as part of efforts to reunify the country under the post Mexican Revolution government. In the following decades, the new art form of communicating socio-political problems and ideas bloomed to colour almost every big city in the world.
With one of the most famous authors, the English-based political activist whose real identity is unknown but his alter ego name known around the world – Banksy, whose mural works of political and social commentary have been featured on streets, walls, and bridges of cities throughout the world.
Due to murals being costly, most of the works have been commissioned and sponsored either by the state for propaganda or by private businesses to attract the public attention, but even so most of the works still have certain aesthetic value and the urban culture benefits from them.
