Artist transformed global landmarks
Christo artist b June 13, 1935 d May 31, 2020
One afternoon in 1962 a Bulgarian art student named Christo Javacheff used a pile of brightly coloured oil barrels to block the narrow Rue Visconti in the Latin Quarter of Paris, in a protest against the Berlin Wall, which had been erected the previous summer. His iron curtain was pulled down by the authorities only a few hours later and largely forgotten, but its creator was not.
This, the first monumental work by the artist who, with his wife JeanneClaude, became famous for temporary transformations of landmarks, set the precedent for a succession of spectacular creations, each with a symbolic meaning. They wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont Neuf in Paris, set up umbrellas in California and Japan, and created a series of saffron-coloured gates in Central Park, New York. Nothing, it seemed, was too large to be shrouded in fabric, including 95,600 square metres of coastline near Sydney in 1969.
Their installations often took several years from conception to completion, although for Christo and Jeanne-Claude, both known professionally by their first names, the planning debate was as much part of the artwork as the wrapping. Their proposal to shroud the Reichstag, the symbolic heartland of the German government, in 100,000sqm of silvery fabric led to 24 arduous years of lobbying.
By the time the shining apparition known as Wrapped Reichstag was unveiled in 1995, Germany was no longer struggling with east-west division, but wrestling with questions of postreunification identity.
Yet for every triumph there were projects that did not quite work: four US Army high-altitude balloons containing 2800 more coloured balloons were meant to be airlifted by helicopter in Minneapolis in 1966, but strong winds meant they rose only 6m off the ground before being dropped back down again.
The Gates (2005) in New York might have been praised by Michael Bloomberg, the mayor, as ‘‘one of the most exciting public art projects ever put on anywhere in the world’’, but the park keepers were underwhelmed by having to repeatedly unfurl the orange fabric as it rolled over the crossbars in the wind.
The Umbrellas (1991), involving the erection of two huge groups of umbrellas in California and Japan, was at first a success, with about three million people using the sites as playgrounds, picnic spots and wedding backdrops. However, when one of the Californian umbrellas was toppled by high winds, killing a 33-year-old woman, Christo ordered that it should close immediately.
Britain missed out on his work until 2018, when Christo, by then widowed, created The Mastaba (meaning ‘‘house for eternity’’ or tomb), a 20m-tall pyramidlike construction made from 7506 gaudily painted barrels, which spent the summer floating on the Serpentine in Hyde Park, central London.
Although Christo and Jeanne-Claude always claimed that their surreal wrappings had no deeper meaning than their spectacular impact, that was itself a wrapping of the truth. As The Times critic Richard Morrison argued: ‘‘When a hugely familiar landmark disappears it’s like the death of a larger-than-life person. You are acutely aware of the void left behind.’’
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff was born in a small village in Bulgaria, the second of three sons of Tzveta Dimitrov and her husband Vladimir Javacheff, a textile worker. He started a six-year course at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia and was studying theatre design in Prague in 1956 when Soviet forces crushed the Hungarian uprising.
Seeing no future behind the Iron Curtain he fled to Vienna, stowing away on a freight train loaded with medical supplies.
From there he made his way to Geneva and then Paris. Later he would argue that the flight from communism was behind his interest in wrapping the Reichstag. ‘‘If I was from Nebraska, the Reichstag would have no meanings for me,’’ he said in 1995.
By the late 1950s, Christo was wrapping ordinary objects such as bicycles and wheelbarrows in plastic and string, like parcels. On one occasion a Christo-wrapped chair was delivered to an auction house where, to the horror of its owner, it was unwrapped by a porter and had to be returned to the artist to be wrapped again.
Christo shared a date of birth with Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, who had been born in Casablanca to a French military family. They met in Paris in 1958 when he was a penniless artist commissioned to paint a portrait of her mother. She was pregnant with Christo’s child when she married someone else, but immediately after her honeymoon she left him for Christo. Their son, Cyril, survives them.
Their first collaboration was in 1961, when they covered oil barrels on the dockside in Cologne. Their Paris installation the following year coincided with Christo’s first exhibition at a nearby gallery. Within a couple of years the family had moved to New York where, despite their barely comprehensible English that never improved, Christo and the red-haired Jeanne-Claude began to create full-size storefronts.
The following year Christo’s 5600sqm phallic ‘‘package’’ was inflated at the Kassel Documenta in Germany, but his first real taste of controversy came with Running Fence (1976), a plan to build an 18ft-high fabric wall across Californian farmland. Despite hiring nine lawyers to secure the consent of 59 dairy farmers, landowners and ranchers, they still had to go through 18 public hearings, questioning such things as whether Christo was a Soviet spy. Yet by the time the fence was finished it was acclaimed as an artistic marvel.
The couple claimed to have used only Christo’s name because of prejudice against female artists and to avoid confusing dealers and the public. That changed in 1994 when they revealed that they had collaborated on all their art projects and retroactively applied their joint names to many of them. Because they claimed never to accept sponsorship, they financed their installations through sales of preparatory studies, scale models and prints of their works, a strategy so successful it became the subject of a case study at the Harvard Business School.
They came as a package, working together, giving interviews together, telling each other’s stories and dovetailing into each other’s sentences. Like the royal family they never flew together. ‘‘We are always in the middle of a project. If we both disappeared who would finish it?’’ they said.
After Jeanne-Claude’s death, Christo declared that he was ‘‘committed to honour the promise they had made to each other many years ago: that the art of Christo and Jeanne-Claude would continue’’. His final project, to wrap the Arc de Triomphe in 25,000sq m of silvery fabric and 7000m of red rope, is still due to go ahead next year.
The couple argued that their installations were about freedom. ‘‘They exist because artists want them to,’’ said Christo, who had taken a course in Marxism before leaving Bulgaria. ‘‘There is no moralising or justification. No-one can buy or own them. No-one can charge [for] tickets.’’ – The Times