Like his contemporary, Andy Warhol, Christo Vladimirov Javacheff earned considerable fame, if not quite Warhol’s fortune, answering a central aesthetic question of our time: What is art? For Warhol, the answer came in a marriage of high art and low commerce and the exploration of celebrity culture. For Christo, his environmental projects and mammoth installations were ephemeral as objects but widely popular with the public, profound but also derided as spectacle.
When he died in New York last week at 84, Christo’s artistic legacy was secure even if his art was hard to find.
Christo was born in Bulgaria in 1935, and his parentage anticipated his subsequent career: His father was the manager of a fabric factory, and his mother was a secretary at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria. By the time Christo himself became a student at the academy in the early 1950s, Bulgaria was under communist rule, and, as described by the New York Times, one of his first assignments as a state-sponsored artist “was to advise farmers along the route of the Orient Express how to arrange their haystacks and machinery in a way that suggested bustling activity and prosperity.”
The experience taught him to conceive aesthetic experiences in wide, sometimes limitless, spaces. It was also excellent training for an artist who, after defecting to Paris in 1957, embraced the absurdist character of the midcentury avant-garde.
The subsequent direction of his work was determined in 1959, when he married Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, the daughter of a French army officer. Christo imagined and designed his projects, and Jeanne-Claude made them happen. Their first joint project, in 1961, established the pattern: Christo aspired to cover oil drums in the Cologne docks with tarps while Jeanne-Claude acquired the materials and dealt with local authorities. In the following year, when Christo blocked a narrow street in Paris with 204 wrapped and stacked oil drums, Jeanne-Claude staved off the police for the hourslong life of their project.
In 1964, they relocated to New York, and in the next few decades, the scale of their joint ambitions grew relentlessly. Christo used huge amounts of fabric to wrap objects, both natural and man-made, and Jeanne-Claude dealt with suppliers and craftsmen and local bureaucracies. In 1969, they wrapped two miles of coastline and jagged cliffs along Little Bay, outside Sydney, Australia, in 2 million square feet of fabric, dismantling the project after 10 weeks.
Thereafter, all their installations were deliberately temporary. The point was not to profit from the objects themselves or reproduce them; the art was in the vision, execution, and ephemeral beauty.
Sometimes, the beauty was especially ephemeral. Their first major American project, Valley Curtain (1972), was a 200-foot-long bright-orange curtain strung across a canyon over Colorado’s Highway 325. It was blown down by wind a month later, but its planning, execution, and construction were chronicled by the documentary filmmakers David and Albert Maysles. The critical and commercial success of Christo’s Valley Curtain (1974) transformed “Christo and Jeanne-Claude” (as they called their enterprise) into household names, allowing them to wrap buildings and bridges and parklands.
In 1983, they enveloped 11 islands in Biscayne Bay with 6.5 million square feet of pink polypropylene fabric. Twelve months later, when they wrapped the Pont Neuf, a bridge in Paris, for two weeks, the vision attracted 3 million visitors. In 2005, after a quarter century of planning, financing, and jumping regulatory hurdles, The Gates, 7,503 16-foot-high gates wrapped in saffron-colored fabric, stretched along 23 miles of paths in New York City’s Central Park for 15 days. His final project of wrapping the Arc de Triomphe, first delayed by nests of protected kestrel falcons and now by the coronavirus, is scheduled to open next year.
Christo once insisted that his works were “absolutely irrational, with no justification to exist.” But six years after German reunification, when he wrapped Berlin’s Reichstag building in a million square feet of silver fabric, he transformed a glowering remnant of Wilhelmine Germany into a luminous, billowing symbol of democracy reborn.
