France's grandfather of street art, Jacques Villeglé, dies age 96

"It is with great sadness that we have learnt of the death of the artist Jacques Villeglé, at the age of 96," the Centre Pompidou in Paris said in a statement on Tuesday.

He was a great artist, an observer and a collector of posters. His unique work had a huge impact on the second half of the 20th century," the modern art museum wrote.

Born Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé 27 March, 1926 in Quimper in western France, Villeglé studied at the Beaux-Arts school in Rennes, then later in Nantes.

Member of the New Realism group (Nouveaux Réalistes) from 1960 with Arman and Yves Klein among others, he was in the 1970s behind a movement of "social-political" graphic art, writing anonymously on the walls of metros and experimenting with the printed word.

With his friend, the photographer and artist Raymond Hains, who died in 2005, Villeglé "scratched" off what was to become his first "poster art" as early as 1949, something he continued doing until 2003.

Essentially, he would chose sections of ripped posters, often revealing layers of older posters underneath, from advertising or politics and transfer them to panels, reframing the content so as to highlight certain colours and forms.

"In the 1960s, we were told we needed to bring museums into the street. But I said we need to bring the street into the museums that are a little bit like cemeteries," he once said.

"In America, I was considered like a precursor of pop art, like Jasper Johns. I'm sure it's thanks to the poster "Carrefour Sèvres Montparnasse".

"Posters have always interested me," he said during his major retrospective at the Pompidou in Paris back in 2008.

"I understood that with them we would see the evolution of the world, the changing words, the new colours".

The end of the 1980s was a "golden age" admits Villeglé where there were "many posters glued everywhere".

The evening of the presidential election in April 1988 was particularly memorable. "I brought a truck, five guys with me and we went around collecting posters. In one hour I had my whole next exhibition," he recounts.

Exhibition in Saint-Malo

"He was admired by all the great museums and his work makes up a large part of our collective imagination. It has changed the way we look at the urban landscape, invitating us to reappropriate the city, to contemplate it, question it and challenge it," wrote the Mayor of Rennes, Nathalie Appéré.

The city of Saint-Malo in Brittany, where Villeglé once used to work, has been working for the past few months with the artist and his daughters to prepare an exhibition to open in the summer, Appéré said.

"On the 9 July, it will be with a lot of emotion that we'll unveil this work of this amazing creator and founder of street art," the Mayor of Saint-Malo Gilles Lurton said.