Christo (1935–2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935–2009)

Six decades after their audacious plan to wrap the Arc de Triomphe was first hatched, Christo and Jeanne-Claude finally made it a reality. But in the cruellest of ironies, neither of them lived to see it. By the time Napoleon’s homage to French imperial puissance was effortfully mummified in 25,000m2 of silvery fabric trussed in place by three kilometres of red rope, both artists were dead: Jeanne-Claude succumbing to a brain aneurysm in 2009, Christo expiring from natural causes in 2020. It made the wrapping of the Arc seem less like a headline-grabbing global art event and more like a memorial. For 16 days last year, the most conspicuous monument to French nationhood was briefly transformed into a shrouded shadow of itself, familiar yet unfamiliar, its energy abruptly stifled, like a mirror covered up in a house of mourning.

Six decades in the making, the artists’ final project saw the Arc de Triomphe wrapped in silvery-blue fabric and red rope, supported by steel scaffolding

Credit: Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation / Photo: Wolfgang Volz / ADAGP, Paris and Dacs, London 2022

Long before the posthumous Arc, Christo and Jeanne-Claude engineered another Parisian coup: the wrapping of the 17th-century Pont Neuf. Traversing the Seine at the western end of the Île de la Cité, the Pont Neuf is the oldest extant bridge in Paris, uniting Right and Left Banks. Completed in 1985, the project was 10 years in the making, as permissions had to be sought, concepts finessed, resources put in place and construction teams assembled. Anchored by a cat’s cradle of ropes and chains, sheets of lustrous golden fabric were laboriously trained under and around the Pont Neuf’s 12 arches, a feat of considerable logistical complexity. The project’s myriad travails were recorded in Christo in Paris, a film by cult documentary cineastes David and Albert Maysles, but viewers seeking a raison d’être will be disappointed. ‘All I know,’ says Christo with a shrug, when asked about what motivates him, ‘is that I feel the need to wrap the Pont Neuf.’

In 1972, the pair raised an orange curtain across a mountainous stretch of Colorado State Highway 325 for just 28 hours before winds destroyed the fabric. Three years later, they began to plan the wrapping of the Pont Neuf in Paris through drawings and scale models, which would require an engineered web of ropes and chains to cover its 12 arches in gold fabric in 1985

Credit: Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation / Photo: Wolfgang Volz / ADAGP, Paris and Dacs, London 2022

Historically, conceptually and emotionally, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Parisian projects are at the core of their oeuvre. In 1958, Christo Vladimirov Javacheff first arrived in Paris as a stateless and penniless refugee. Transplanted to the City of Light from Eastern Europe, his prospects were precarious, but he rented an attic room with a view of the Arc de Triomphe and started scheming. ‘Paris is madness,’ he reported to his parents. ‘Each day is more beautiful, it’s wonderful, it has a never-ending charm.’

Born in Bulgaria, Christo trained at the Sofia Academy of Fine Arts, where students were expected to spend weekends painting state propaganda and artfully ‘Potemkinising’ the terrain around the Orient Express railway line, so that foreign travellers might form a favourable impression of the Bulgarian countryside. Disenchanted with the Communist regime, he escaped to Vienna in a boxcar, eventually ending up in Paris, where he read Camus and Sartre, and scraped a living painting society portraits. Commissioned to immortalise Précilda de Guillebon, the well-to-do wife of a French general, he crossed paths with her daughter, Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, who was marking time after studying Latin and philosophy at Tunis University. They discovered that they shared the same birthday: 13 June 1935. Artistic ambitions and personal relationships slowly coalesced.

In 1958, Christo wrapped his first object, enveloping a paint can in resin-soaked canvas, binding it with twine, and then coating the package with a mixture of glue, varnish and dark paint. With its unsettling, miserabilist overtones, Christo’s work began to resonate with critics and curators as part of French nouveau réalisme, based on ‘new ways of perceiving the real’ according to the movement’s founder Pierre Restany.

By the early ’60s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude were fully fledged artistic partners, blockading the Rue Visconti – a stone’s throw from the École des Beaux Arts, France’s historic seat of elite art education – with an ‘Iron Curtain’, created in response to the real one newly erected in Berlin. Instead of concrete blocks, rust-encrusted oil drums were stacked into an improvised barricade across the narrow street. Around that time, the idea of wrapping or packaging a generic public building first took root.

Sketches and photomontages from this era show how the original idea of wrapped architecture was intended to be more quotidian and subversive – built construction flattened out and reduced to a colossal mute package. This followed early experiments with mummifying household objects: chairs, prams, shoes, a toy horse, a tailor’s dummy. Tightly bound in cocoons of brown fabric and sometimes coated with a suffocating layer of lacquer, these fetishistic grotesqueries are far more grungily repulsive than the diaphanous, customised draperies that eventually enrobed the Arc. ‘Like a cartoon version of a horror film’, as the art critic Wilson Tarbox described it. By then, of course, Christo and Jeanne-Claude had long escaped the Paris backstreets and attic ateliers, sloughing off any suggestion of the grotesque to self-actualise into a global brand, a pair of art-world super villains, always plotting their next caper.

A 1964 drawing showing 20 Exchange Place in Manhattan shrouded in fabric, begins to demonstrate Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s ambitions for bigger work. This would come to pass in 1968, when the pair created the largest ever inflatable structure without a skeleton in Kassel, Germany using 2,000m2 of fabric to construct the gigantic 7-ton work

Credit: Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation /Collection Mr and Mrs Robert Kardon, New York / Photo: André Grossmann / ADAGP, Paris and Dacs, London 2022

A drawing for The Umbrellas, 1991, a joint project between Japan and the US, shows a forest of 6m-high yellow umbrellas sitting in the Castac Valley in California

En route, like many artists before them, they confected and consolidated their own semi-mythic status, beginning with the written-in-the-stars coincidence of their birth, under the astrologically apt sign of Gemini: the twins. They flew in separate planes, so if one were to crash, the other could carry on their creations. ‘The Christos do not spend their money on mainstream pleasures,’ they proclaimed with evangelical zeal in 1998. ‘They have their own priorities, that is, to create works of art with JOY and BEAUTY.’ For 37 years, they operated under a single appellation, ‘Christo’, latterly amended to ‘Christo and Jeanne-Claude’ to connote more explicitly an equal artistic partnership, but the relationship was also one of mutually beneficial symbiosis. Christo could not have done it without Jeanne-Claude, and vice versa.

Early on, they defined the terms of their collaboration, alighting jointly on projects. The scope and form of each was envisaged by Christo in the form of preparatory drawings, collages and sketches. Jeanne-Claude would then supervise the logistics of fabrication and installation, involving teams of workers, some highly skilled construction technicians, others simply local people or students. As time went on, projects were increasingly characterised by a mania for detail and branding. The 430 workers who toiled on Surrounded Islands, a controversial 1983 conceit which involved floating sections of pink polypropylene around 11 islands in Miami’s Biscayne Bay, were outfitted with pink colour-coordinated uniforms and a legend on the back that read ‘Christo Surrounded Islands’.

Throughout their career, they were always at pains to point out that they never accepted sponsorship from governments or other organisations to cover their often stratospheric costs. The 1995 wrapping of the Berlin Reichstag, for example, racked up a bill of US$15 million; the Arc cost US$16.5 million. Instead, as the couple’s fame intensified, Christo’s drawings and models became covetable objects in themselves, creating a market and source of income that was used to fund their big-ticket schemes.

In 1964 they left Paris for New York, excitedly alighting on wrapping projects for One Times Square and other Manhattan skyscrapers, as well as the Whitney Museum and MoMA. Unsurprisingly, these overtures were rebuffed, but live on in drawings. They did, however, succeed in wrapping the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, an undistinguished single-storey shoebox and former headquarters of Playboy Enterprises. For this they selected a greenish-brown tarpaulin, giving the project the edgy, utilitarian feel of a building under repair, as distinct from the swishier Paris wrappings or the diaphanous plastic veil employed to enrobe the Bern Kunsthalle, their very first wrapped building in 1968.

But the line between art and utility can be fine. Before he was properly famous, Christo wrapped a statue of Venus in the garden of Rome’s Villa Borghese without permission or fanfare. The Italian authorities assumed it was part of routine maintenance, and the statue remained illicitly shrouded for six months before Christo’s prank was rumbled.

When Christo first arrived in Paris, he began to wrap small and everyday objects to render them useless: Package, 1958 and Package on Baby Carriage, 1962 (below), were among these early works. He would later increase in scale, as seen here wrapping Paul Niclausse’s statue Le Printemps on the Trocadéro in Paris in 1964

Credit: Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation / Photo: Eeva-Inkeri / ADAGP, Paris and Dacs, London 2022

Paul Niclausse’s statue Le Printemps on the Trocadéro in Paris in 1964

Credit: Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation and J Paul Getty / Photo: Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation / Photo: Eeva-Inkeri trust / Photo: Shunk-Kender / ADAGP, Paris and Dacs, London

Expanding their repertoire beyond wrapping things, Christo and Jeanne-Claude turned their attention to site-specific environmental installations. In works such as Valley Curtain (1972), suspended between two Colorado mountain slopes like a giant orange washing line, and The Gates (2005) in New York’s Central Park, there are faint echoes of the state-sanctioned weekends of Christo’s youth spent prettifying the Bulgarian countryside. On occasion, they also wrapped trees, which proved less logistically onerous, and experimented with large-scale inflatables. It’s tempting to see this parallel phase of activity as a metaphorical and literal unclenching, after being obliged to deal with the grinding proscriptions associated with attempting to wrap buildings in cities. No longer trussed pornographically around static objects, draperies were now billowing free, emerging from the stultifying attic into the fresh air.

However, operating al fresco only seemed to encourage Christo and Jeanne-Claude to conceive of ever more huge and vacuous undertakings. The Umbrellas project of 1991 involved fabricating and dispersing 3,100 giant umbrellas around two sites in California and Japan. Dotting a rolling topography of inland valleys and rice fields, the vivid blue and yellow umbrellas seemed innocuous enough. But nature can be horribly capricious. In a freak accident, Lori Keevil-Matthews, a 34-year-old insurance agent and mother of an eight-year-old daughter, was killed when one of the umbrellas, weighing over 200kg, was uprooted by high winds, crushing her against a boulder. In place for only 18 days, the installations in both California and Japan were hastily dismantled, and the copper-bottomed damage limitation strategies that come with being a couple of high-profile international artists, duly activated. An undisclosed settlement was reached with Keevil-Matthews’ family, and Team Christo sent 50 red and pink roses to her funeral.

It is doubtful that the art world will ever see another Christo and Jeanne-Claude: the extended project timescales, Herculean feats of labour, huge quantities of materials and vast expense required to contrive works with the life span of a butterfly all now seems jaw-droppingly excessive. Driven by ego and enabled by an unsung cast of thousands, art was progressively reframed as an empty spectacle, the bigger the better.

Yet in death, as in life, Christo and Jeanne-Claude are still operating on a pharaonic scale from beyond the grave. First conceived in 1977, their final and only permanent project is still a work very much in progress. A mastaba composed of nearly half a million oil drums is due to be constructed in the desert south of Abu Dhabi, a conceit of Ozymandian proportions towering 150m over Shelley’s ‘lone and level sands’. But regardless of what may play out in the desert, they’ll always have Paris.