He is the poster boy for the nation’s chattering courses and artwork world – a person feted for creating works that poke enjoyable on the Institution, whereas, famously, hiding his id.
Underneath the pseudonym Banksy, he has turn out to be a world star with an estimated £50 million fortune. His Woman With Balloon has been rated the ‘nation’s best-loved murals’, extra widespread than John Constable’s The Hay Wain. The outcomes got here from a ballot, based mostly on an inventory compiled by arts writers together with the Observer’s media correspondent.
However there’s an egregious hypocrisy behind all this hero-worship.
Banksy’s fame and monetary pulling energy depend on the mystique of his anonymity. And though his actual identify has been public information for 15 years, due to a Mail on Sunday investigation, Banksy’s fawning followers connive to disregard this truth.
As a substitute of calling him by his actual identify – Robin Gunningham – there’s a surreal omerta, along with his true id intentionally camouflaged.
This, in response to artwork specialists, permits him to take advantage of his carefully-nurtured picture as ‘the Scarlet Pimpernel of contemporary artwork’ and make much more cash as somebody who wears his street-cred like a hairshirt.
Michel Boersma, curator of exhibition The Artwork of Banksy, in London’s Regent Road, is ‘satisfied’ that folks do not need to know the id of this Robin Hood of artwork.
He says: ‘The general public don’t desire the thriller to cease as a result of it is a beautiful fairytale. The artwork world does not need his id to be recognized as a result of it might take away from the mystique – and mystique makes cash.’
It was in 2008 that the MoS revealed Banksy’s actual identify, printed alongside a photograph of him on the street with a paint spray can. However a brand new work by ‘road artist and political activist’ Banksy is undoubtedly value much more than a bit by Robin Gunningham, a 50-year-old former public schoolboy, introduced up in a cheerful, middle-class residence.
The artist’s story has once more been introduced up with a ten-part BBC Radio 4 podcast, The Banksy Story, launched earlier this yr. Final week, the podcast re-broadcast ‘the misplaced Banksy interview’, recorded again in 2003.
Within the 20-year-old dialogue, the BBC entertainments editor who interviews Gunningham appears to swallow his declare that his actual identify is ‘Robbie Banks’ – an obvious play on Robin Hood, which panders to the thought of a folks hero who steals from the wealthy and provides to the poor.
Based on the podcast, the interview was recorded within the run-up to the artist’s thirtieth birthday, as he was putting in his debut exhibition, Turf Battle, in a warehouse in Hackney, East London.
The present featured a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II as a chimpanzee, one in all Winston Churchill with a grass Mohican and two stay pigs painted within the blue and white test worn by the Met Police.
Within the interview, Banksy stated his work was a ‘celebration of vandalism’. He added: ‘It is about justice. In the event you’ve ever fallen foul of the justice system, then it turns you very sceptical about every part, so I suppose I like to show it on its head a bit of bit. I am into figuring out who actually are the great guys.’
He additionally admits to being a prison: ‘Finished correctly, it’s unlawful.’
5 years later, after an investigation during which the MoS spoke to dozens of pals, former colleagues, flatmates and members of his household, we revealed Banksy was not a radical tear-away from an inner-city council property. As a substitute the artist is the son of former contracts supervisor Peter Gunningham and his spouse, firm director’s secretary Pamela, and grew up in one in all Bristol’s most elegant neighbourhoods. It’s arduous to think about Banksy, the anti-authoritarian renegade, as the general public schoolboy he was at Bristol Cathedral Faculty, wandering across the seventeenth Century former monastery. However fellow pupils bear in mind Gunningham as being a gifted artist.
Scott Nurse, an insurance coverage dealer who was in his class, stated: ‘He was extraordinarily gifted at artwork. I’m not in any respect shocked if he’s Banksy.’
Whereas at college, Gunningham turned eager about graffiti, impressed by native band Large Assault’s Robert Del Naja, credited with being one of many first graffiti artists in Bristol and who glided by the identify 3D. The 2 have since turn out to be pals and the MoS discovered a photograph of them collectively.
Whereas embellishing his agit-prop picture throughout an interview with pop-culture journal Swindle in 2006, Banksy stated: ‘After I was about ten years previous, a child known as 3D was portray the streets arduous.
‘I feel he’d been to New York and was the primary to convey spray portray again to Bristol. I grew up seeing spray paint on the streets means earlier than I ever noticed it in {a magazine} or on a pc… Graffiti was the factor all of us cherished at college… Everybody was doing it.’
Gunningham left faculty at 16 and commenced dabbling in road artwork.
The next yr, as a part of Operation Anderson, undercover police arrested 72 artists throughout Britain on prison harm expenses. These arrested included Tom Bingle, a graffiti artist acknowledged to be Banksy’s accomplice in crime, who now runs his personal artwork firm known as Inkie. He was acquitted.
Gunningham was not arrested and there’s no document of him being apprehended. However the artist has confessed he had by then turn out to be knowledgeable at evading police, helped by the truth that, till outed by the MoS, his identify was a thriller.
In his ebook Wall And Piece, Banksy stated: ‘After I was 18, I spent one evening attempting to color ‘late once more’ in huge silver bubble letters on the facet of a passenger prepare. British Transport Police confirmed up and I acquired ripped to shreds operating away by means of a thorny bush.
‘The remainder of my mates made it to the automotive and disappeared, so I spent over an hour hidden below a dumper truck with engine oil leaking throughout me.’
By 2003, Banksy was residing in London and had begun utilizing stencils, growing distinctive, recognisable photos similar to rats and policemen which communicated his anti-authoritarian message. In October of that yr, he snuck into the Tate Gallery dressed as a pensioner and glued an image to the wall. The picture was there for two-and-a-half hours.
He had arrived.
Since then, he has bought works to singer Christina Aguilera – who owns a pornographic image of Queen Victoria with a prostitute – and actress Angelina Jolie, who has a twist on a Manet portray during which a white household lunch below an umbrella watched by 15 ravenous Africans. He additionally created the art work for Blur’s Suppose Tank album. In 2006, Gunningham acquired married in Las Vegas to Pleasure Millward, a former researcher for the Labour MP Austin Mitchell.
Since then he has gone on to make a multi-million-pound fortune.
His costliest work to be bought at public sale is his Love Is In The Bin work, which bought at Sotheby’s for £18.6 million in 2021.
An adaptation of his 2002 mural, Woman With Balloon, it turned notorious in 2018 after self-destructing inside seconds of being bought for greater than £1 million, sliding by means of the underside of the body and shredding.
After being recognized by the MoS, Banksy didn’t subject a denial, however stated: ‘I am unable to touch upon who might or might not be Banksy.’
However in 2016, scientists at London’s Queen Mary College employed ‘geographic profiling’ – usually used to catch criminals or monitor the unfold of illness – to say that Gunningham was ‘the one critical suspect’.
They plotted the places of 192 of Banksy’s presumed artworks and located ‘sizzling spots’ which correlated to a pub, enjoying fields and houses intently linked to Gunningham, his family and friends.
The next yr, the MoS found a photograph of the artist sporting a high-vis jacket at work on one in all his items – an enormous white rat daubed on Liverpool’s derelict White Horse pub in 2004.
Taken by Christopher Wilson, the photographer stated of Gunningham’s id: ‘There isn’t any means that anyone can ignore the proof now.’
And in 2018, two artworks (cassette sleeves on albums by Bristol band Mom Samosa and signed by Gunningham) had been marketed by the web seller MyArtBroker, with an estimate of £4,000.
The albums had been recorded at studios in Bristol by Martin Smith, who stated: ‘I bear in mind him [Gunningham] going out on a bicycle with a basket on the entrance with stencils in it. He stated to me: ‘I will change my identify to Robin Banks. What do you suppose?’ Smith urged him to do it – and so it was that Banksy stated within the interview in 2003 that his identify was ‘Robbie Banks’.
Earlier this month, Banksy was anticipated to be formally unmasked attributable to a £1.4 million defamation declare towards him.
The case has been introduced by Andrew Gallagher, a graffiti photographer and proprietor of art-licensing firm Full Color Black, which collaborated with clothes model Guess on a ‘Graffiti by Banksy’ store window, that includes the well-known piece Flower Bomber
In response, Banksy posted on Instagram: ‘Consideration all shoplifters. Please go to Guess on Regent Road. They’ve helped themselves to my art work with out asking. How can it’s incorrect to do the identical to their garments?’
Gallagher claims the message ‘by means of innuendo, meant and was understood to imply’ that he had stolen Banksy’s art work with out permission.
Banksy, if he filed a defence, would have had to offer his actual identify – however has now missed a deadline to file submissions.
Based on MyArtBroker, ‘the cult of Banksy is due, partly, to his anonymity. His obscurity is intrinsic to the model.
‘Maybe it’s sensationalism of the so-called ‘genius artist’ that spurs our curiosity, or possibly it’s as a result of the id of an artist is so elementary to the that means of their work.’
Definitely, ‘the cult of Banksy’ has a a lot better ring to it – and far, rather more business potential – than the ‘cult of Robin Gunningham’.
