Christo, Fearless Maker of Massive Public Artworks, Has Died at 84

Christo, who with his partner Jeanne-Claude used sculpture as a means to dramatically shift people’s understanding of iconic structures and sites, has died at 84. According to a press release put out by the artist’s office, Christo died on May 31 of natural causes.

“Christo lived his life to the fullest, not only dreaming up what seemed impossible but realizing it,” the artist’s office said in a statement. “Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s artwork brought people together in shared experiences across the globe, and their work lives on in our hearts and memories.”

The news comes as Christo was to take on one of his most ambitious projects to date, a sculpture that would see Paris’s Arc de Triomphe wrapped in 269,097 square feet of fabric. Titled L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped (Project for Paris, Place de l’Étoile – Charles de Gaulle) and first conceived in 1962 by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the project is still expected to be executed in September 2021, the artist’s office confirmed in its death notice. (The Arc de Triomphe wrapping was originally expected to take place this year, but it was re-dated because of the coronavirus pandemic.)

With Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009, Christo created some of the most iconic sculptures of the past half-century. Many involved temporarily sheathing well-known buildings in hundreds of thousands of square feet of fabric, effectively deconstructing and reconstructing the way we think about how those structures function with respect to the surrounding landscape. Among the structures wrapped by the couple were the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris, Biscayne Bay in Miami, and the Reichstag in Berlin.

Yet the wrappings themselves are only one facet of each project. Christo and Jeanne-Claude considered the bureaucratic wrangling required to realize a given sculpture—as well as related documentation, such as environmental impact reports and drawings and diagrams made in the planning stages—to be a part of the works as well. In proposing that monumental sculptures are more than just the final, realized object itself, Christo and Jeanne-Claude shifted how public art is made and understood.

Occasionally, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s artworks courted controversy. Their biggest work, the Biscayne Bay wrapping, titled Surrounded Islands (1980–83), involved more than 6.5 million square feet of pink fabric that was unfurled from islands around Miami. The work was visually striking, and gained national coverage because of it. But locals reacted to it with a mix of ire and confusion. Some raised concerns about the way the sculpture could permanently alter the local ecosystem—one representative for the National Wildlife Rescue Team even gave himself the moniker “the Count of anti-Christo” because he was so opposed to it. Others labeled the artwork frivolous for its cost—an estimated $3.5 million—and claimed that Christo and Jeanne-Claude had offered Miami a present that its residents didn’t want. And still others claimed it was ugly, or that Christo and Jeanne-Claude were making a mockery of the city’s outré tastes.

For better and for worse, all that made Surrounded Islands a typical Christo and Jeanne-Claude artwork. Christo, who often remained stoic in the face of mounting criticism, listened carefully to his detractors, but chose to wave them off, telling ARTnews in 1984, “The work develops its own dimension. It is always bigger than my imagination alone.” He called the project “my Water Lilies,” referencing Claude Monet’s Impressionist paintings, and said it was a “poetical gesture.” After the propylene fabric was disassembled and Biscayne Bay was returned to its prior state, Christo said the work was “still in the mind of the people.”

[Read a guide to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s biggest wrappings.]

Such a reference to the deep psychological impact of the wrappings had a basis in history. Christo and Jeanne-Claude began working in Paris during the 1960s, and their early works owe something to Situationism, a movement led by Marxist intellectuals such as Guy Debord that considered how the media shaped the public consciousness. Among the Situationist movement’s key concepts were those of détournement, through which preexisting places and images are appropriated and subverted, and dérive, in which one’s understanding of an urban landscape is disrupted. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s earliest works drew on both concepts—and in the process opened up new possibilities for public art.

Their most important work from that era was Le Rideau de Fer (The Iron Curtain), a 1961–62 sculpture involving the placement of 89 oil barrels that effectively walled off one of the narrowest roads in Paris. With a title paying homage to the Berlin Wall, which had been erected less than a year before the work’s realization, Le Rideau de Fer was produced around the same time that controversy over the Algerian War was brewing in France.

The piece—which was so controversial that the artists were nearly arrested upon its exhibition—was evocative of an increasingly radical line of political thinking among Paris’s youth, and its use of barrels that had been produced for major gas companies such as Esso, Shell, and BP hinted at a critique of—and a distaste for—bourgeois attitudes. “This ‘iron curtain’ can be used as a barricade during a period of public work in the street, or to transform the street into a dead end,” Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrote in an application submitted to the local government. “Finally its principle can be extended to a whole area or an entire city.” Like many works by the couple, Le Rideau de Fer was ultimately deconstructed; it now exists only in the form of photographs, sketches, and written documentation.

As Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s career went on, however, it grew increasingly difficult to tell how political their works were meant to be. Critics and politicians alike found it hard to ascribe a direct meaning to the couple’s 1971–95 work Wrapped Reichstag, which involved the veiling of a building used for political assemblies that was nearly destroyed during World War II. First conceived when Germany was still divided by the Berlin Wall, the work was finally realized in 1995, after politicians had debated whether it was intended to promote some insidious kind of nationalism. “Now that the wall is down some observers are seeing it as a bundling away of the past, others as a chrysalis out of which a new Germany will emerge,” Michael Kimmelman wrote in a New York Times review. “The symbolism, in other words, is whatever one makes of it.”

Wrapped Reichstag had been aesthetically mapped out in advance. Special care had been taken to make it look as though certain statues on the building’s edifice were missing; its corners were also rendered more visible through the way the fabric was tied. Even the work’s detractors had to admit that Wrapped Reichstag was a visually appealing artwork.

The same could be said of just about any other Christo project, and people have come in droves to view his and Jeanne-Claude’s art because of they are spectacles that must be seen to be believed. Even though pictures of The Gates, a project shown in New York’s Central Park in 2005, were made widely available in the press, huge crowds still made the trek to commune with the work in person. The installation featured 7,503 gates—arch-like structures with billowy squares of saffron-colored fabric hung from them—spread around the park; anyone who witnessed the work is unlikely to have forgotten it.

Christo often spoke about his artworks in terms that seemed to suggest they were functionless. “We make beautiful things, unbelievably useless, totally unnecessary,” he once said. The data suggests otherwise, however. Local officials estimated that The Gates singlehandedly generated $80 million in tourism—a massive and nearly unparalleled sum for a public artwork in New York, a city that has played host to a slew of memorable monumental sculptures over the years.

Christo Vladimirov Javacheff was born on June 13, 1935, in Gabrovo, Bulgaria. (He and Jeanne-Claude were born on the same exact day—which became an integral and oft-repeated part of the couple’s lore.) His early life saw him bouncing around Europe, studying at the National Academy of Art in Sofia from 1953 to 1956, then moving to Prague, then to Vienna, then to Geneva, and finally to Paris, where, in 1958, he met Jeanne-Claude. Not too long after, the couple had a child.

Some of Christo’s earliest works have been considered a part of France’s Nouveau Réalisme movement. Formed by critic Pierre Restany and artist Yves Klein, the movement was intended to discover “new ways of perceiving the real,” as they wrote in a 1960 manifesto signed by its purveyors. (Though Christo showed with the group, he was not one of the manifesto’s signatories.) Those “new ways of perceiving the real” involved bizarre, freewheeling responses to a budding consumer culture taking hold in France at the time. Jacques Villeglé was showing torn advertisements as artworks. Yves Klein was patenting a shade of blue and using it to create monochromes. Daniel Spoerri was exhibiting tables lined with objects that he found on them as “tableaux pièges,” or “trap paintings.”

Christo’s contribution to the movement was early wrappings. Looked at today, these sculptures are relatively lo-fi for an artist who would later produce a succession of far more baroque wrappings. They often involved everyday objects—cans, newspapers, bottles—that are covered in fabric and twine. They have a secretive quality that sometimes causes them to seem like presents ready for unwrapping, and their elusiveness would foreshadow the more mysterious sculptures that followed.

The wrappings grew increasingly strange as the ’60s and ’70s progressed. There was a woman covered in see-through material that looked an awful lot like a corpse, and there was a Volkswagen strung up in rope and fabric. There was a wrapped motorcycle too, and a wrapped tree, and even a wrapped portrait of Jeanne-Claude. And there were plans to wrap a host of objects that have still never been realized—one involved giving a public Picasso sculpture in New York the wrapping treatment.

The first monumental public wrapping was the 1970–72 work Valley Curtain, which appeared in Rifle, Colorado, for just 28 hours. Featuring 200,000 square feet of fabric that loomed over a highway, the work was destroyed by a gale force wind—but the work lives on in the form of an Oscar-winning short documentary by Albert and David Masyles. Documentation such as the Maysles’ film has become key to seeing and understanding Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s no-longer-extant works, and Wolfgang Volz has shot numerous important photographic images of the artists’ works in progress.

What remains of the wrappings largely exists in the form of preparatory works, which have been sold by Christo to fund some of his more expensive projects. A less-often-discussed, though greatly important, aspect of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s works are the reports that have been published alongside them, which disclosed, in painstaking detail, how much workers were compensated and how funds were appropriated. The artists also made public data about the environmental ramifications of their artworks—a gesture they first undertook with the 1972–76 piece Running Fence, which featured 24 miles of fabric that extended from a California highway to a coastline. In 2010, Christo was asked why the couple issued the environmental report. “It’s common sense,” he told his interviewer.

Because Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s ambitions were so grand, many projects by the artists still have not been realized. Among them is The Mastaba, a project that calls for 410,000 oil drums to be placed in a pyramid-like form in an Abu Dhabi desert. The work, first thought up by the artists in 1977, is expected to be one of the world’s biggest public artworks—though it is unclear when, if ever, it will be completed. (A 600-ton barrel piece was unveiled at London’s Serpentine Galleries in 2018.)

Christo continued plugging away in the later part of his life, working tirelessly even after Jeanne-Claude died in 2009 of a brain aneurysm. He seemed to find an echo of his own mortality in the sculptures he produced solo. One was Floating Piers (2014–16), for which visitors to Italy’s Lake Iseo could take a walk across a dock-like structure that was covered in fabric. That piece, he said, would not last forever. “It creates an incredible urgency because it will never take place again,” he ahead if the piece’s unveiling. “That’s why it’s so exciting.”

Source: artnews.com