How I threw away a work of modern art By David Chazan

BBC News, Paris Published duration 3 November 2017

image copyright Getty Images image caption A work by French street artist Invader on display at an exhibition in Los Angeles

To me, it looked like a child's crude attempt at a mosaic. About a dozen small square tiles of different colours. Glued to the wall in a geometric design vaguely resembling a face with two square eyes.

It stood out in the otherwise empty and dingy Paris flat. Once my home, I was moving back in, after nearly 20 years away. My tenants, three young single men, were showing me round before they left.

"What's that?" I asked, pointing at the cluster of tiles.

"That's by Invader," my tenant replied. "He's a street artist. He's like a French Banksy."

I quite liked Banksy, but the young man must have seen that I didn't appear overly impressed by his French counterpart.

"You must leave this," he said earnestly. "One day it will be worth a lot of money."

image copyright Alamy image caption The tiled pieces such as this one in London are inspired by the 1978 video game Space Invaders

Being British, I nodded politely - but inwardly I chortled at the notion that a few tiles stuck on a bedroom wall could ever be considered a work of art.

Trying to prove I wasn't too old to get it, I said: "It reminds me of something." After struggling for a few seconds to recall exactly what, I exclaimed triumphantly: "Tetris!"

Now it was his turn to look dubious, so I explained: "You know, the video game from the 80s." "Not Tetris," he said, mock-patiently. "Space Invaders. The mother of modern video games."

He added: "The artist came to one of our parties and ended up staying a few months. It was his way of saying thank you. Now we're leaving it for you."

Read more about Invader

My neighbours had complained over the years - with varying degrees of indignation and perhaps envy - that the three young men had thrown raucous parties nearly every weekend. The flat was such a wreck that my tenant admitted that, when he was working during the week as an up-and-coming executive, he stayed at his girlfriend's.

Now he was getting married, while I was about to transform the bachelor party pad back into a respectable bourgeois home.

I duly promised the young men that I would look after the artwork and thanked them for leaving it. But then the builders came to replaster and repaint the room.

"I might leave that," I told them.

They looked at me sceptically. "Why do you want to keep it? It will look strange," the painter said.

I hesitated, but only for a moment. The wall was stripped, replastered and painted a tasteful shade of blanc cassé - off-white, far more aesthetically pleasing than a bunch of multicoloured tiles.

That was nine years ago, when I was moving back to France.

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As the years passed, I noticed more of the Space Invaders mosaics on buildings around Paris. Never did I feel a twinge of regret for destroying the one in my flat.

Then, two years ago, it began to dawn on me what I'd done.

I reported on how one of the distinctive mosaics of the French street artist known as Invader was about to be displayed - on board the International Space Station. The European Space Agency said it would - in their words - highlight the bridges between art and space.

It was bigger, but otherwise similar to the one I'd unceremoniously stripped out of my flat.

image copyright ESA/NASA image caption Artwork by Invader has turned up on the International Space Station and European Space Agency ground installations

Invader was a global phenomenon, famous in New York, Hong Kong, London, and of course Paris.

Then came the real blow. To my horror, I learned that one of his works had sold for more than €200,000 (£178,000; $233,000).

The mosaics I'd once scoffed at are now so sought-after that thieves posing as municipal workers in high-visibility vests went around Paris this summer carefully removing them.

Theft and vandalism have always been problems for Invader, a graduate of the Paris School of Fine Arts who was born in 1969, the year man landed on the Moon.

But there's a fightback: fans known as "reactivators" photograph his works and reconstruct those that get damaged or disappear.

Had I taken a picture of the one in my flat, I could have called in the reactivators.

Now, I'll just have to live with the fact that I tossed out a valuable work of art because I preferred a smooth, blank, white wall.

Perhaps I could try to market a piece of that as a work of art. But hold on a minute - hasn't someone already come up with that concept?