Gazing out on the Arc de Triomphe from a maid’s room in a Paris apartment, the 23-year-old Bulgarian artist had just one thought: Wrap it. The artist was named Christo Vladimirov Javacheff. Not only was he unknown. He was also stateless, having fled Communist Bulgaria on a train. The idea of wrapping one of the most famous monuments in Paris, using a technique he was developing to cover small objects such as a hobbyhorse and a baby carriage, was about as outlandish as – well, it really had no comparison.
Christo. The Arc de Triumph (Project for Paris, Place de l'Etoile – Charles de Gaulle). Wrapped ... [+]
But Christo was incomparable in his own right. And after he met and married his lifelong artistic partner, Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon, the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe became nothing more than a 63-year logistical challenge.
The monument will be wrapped in 2021, twelve years after Jeanne-Claude’s death and a year after Christo’s own passing. As a prelude, the Centre Pompidou has recently opened an important retrospective of Christo’s Paris work from the ‘50s, and published a substantial and scholarly catalogue.
The small scale of Christo’s early work lends itself well to a museum exhibition. Although the drawings and maquettes he made as plans for monumental projects are art in their own right, they are secondary to the ephemeral wrappings of buildings and landscapes they illustrate. His sculptures from the ‘50s are both literally and figuratively self-contained, allowing for a level of scrutiny that is impossible now in the case of the long-gone Wrapped Reichstag and Running Fence, and won’t even be feasible when people get to walk around L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped next September.
In a recent New York Times interview, Pompidou curator Sophie Duplaix perfectly captured one of the qualities that stands out in the presence of these early sculptures. “He drew with thread and rope,” she explained. The museum pieces show how deliberately he defined the form of wrapped sculptures, and prepares the viewer to appreciate equivalent graphic mastery he deployed at architectural scale.
A footnote in Christo’s biography helps to reinforce this point, and also to show how useful the language of drawing is when considering his sculptural work. In 1959, one year after he arrived in Paris, Christo visited Alberto Giacometti’s studio, where he saw some of Giacometti’s plaster models wrapped in damp cloth to keep them from drying out. The sight inspired Christo to experiment with wrapping bodies – of living people as well as statues – which turned out to have some of the aesthetic qualities of Giacometti’s drawings.
Petit cheval empaqueté [Wrapped Toy Horse], 1963. Fabric, twine, rope, toy horse on wheels. 40.6 × ... [+]
But as worthwhile as it may be to consider the sculptures of the ‘50s when looking the epic work – and to recognize the process of wrapping as a transient translation into two-dimensional space by way of topological ingenuity – it is equally important to consider what changed when Christo and Jeanne-Claude scaled up their practice. Large works required great effort involving many constituencies. Although ephemeral, they were essentially civic works with civic impact.
Even if Christo had supernatural powers, he couldn’t have accomplished this on his own. When he and Jeanne-Claude blocked a Paris side-street with a stack of barrels in 1962, the unauthorized action was construed as political protest more than art. And his elicit wrapping of a statue in the gardens of Villa Borghese in 1963 was scarcely even noticed: It remained in place for many months, mistaken for conservation work. The public quality of the later epic works – their presentation as public art – provided essential context to the masses that encountered them. Whether the works were loved or hated, people were prepared to regard them aesthetically.
Still it’s important to recognize that these sculptures were not only physical but also social. From fundraising to environmental assessments to the approval of the French President, the creation of L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped has wrapped up people who might otherwise never have had cause to come together. The purely artistic intent behind this shared ambition has the power to create a new culture.
A tribute to the originality of the 23-year-old Bulgarian’s vision, this is also a reason why Christo’s way of making art must not be allowed to die with him. Physical wrappings will forever remain his signature. But the collective will to create ephemeral monuments to new social relationships – well, that really needs to endure.
