In 1952 Hundertwasser created the collage 145 THE VALUES OF THE STREET, for which he used found objects, rubbish such as chocolate wrappers, cigarette packets or other packaging, tickets, cinema tickets, scraps of newspapers and anything else he could collect from a limited stretch of road and combine into a collage. He was fascinated by looking down at the street, where the most fantastic lines, shapes, colours and compositions, the cracks in the pavement, like lanes of spilt milk, stimulated his imagination and set his creative ideas in motion. He set out to produce a book with photographs of pavements in Vienna, Paris, Rome, New York and Tokyo with precise details of the streets and pavement positions, as a textbook on automatic tachisme. To this end, he repeatedly photographed pavements from above, as well as a wide variety of scenes on his forays through the city. These photos were kept in his archive in a notebook entitled "Werte der Straße" (street values), but were not published during his lifetime. A selection was printed for the first time in the catalogue of the exhibition "Hundertwasser - Japan and the Avant-garde" at the Belvedere in Vienna in 2013.