A remainder of one
A 20m pyramid is coming to Hyde Park. Meet Christo, the artist creating the sculpture
Christo has wrapped the Reichstag, turned islands pink and enabled people to walk on water. This month in London, the Bulgarian artist unveils his newest work, a truncated pyramid floating on the Serpentine Lake. But the London Mastaba is a scaled-down version of another, far more ambitious work: one that he and his late wife, Jeanne-Claude, had been planning for decades and which, if he completes it, will be the biggest and most expensive sculpture ever created. But as Christo turns 83, are the odds against their masterwork being realised in his own lifetime starting to stack?
at the beginning of April this year, a company called London Mastaba Limited took up residence on the northern bank of the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park. There, in a low white marquee and a series of shipping containers, a group of around 35 engineers and construction workers, overseen by one of the company’s directors, an ebullient bearded Bulgarian called Vladimir Yavachev, began building a large floating platform, 40m long and 30m wide, made of white, high-density polyethylene cubes. Over the following few weeks, a second layer of cubes was placed on top, then a horizontal steel frame, followed by a vertical scaffolding structure. At the beginning of May, deliveries of 55-gallon oil barrels, specially constructed at a factory in the Netherlands, started to arrive. The barrels, 7,506 in total, were placed on their side and bolted to the scaffolding frame in neat rows.
If all continues to go to plan, by mid-June the completed structure, which will by now be 20m high and resemble a pyramid with the top cut off – an ancient form called a “mastaba”, first appearing in Mesopotamia as mud benches, from which the Arabic name is derived; later seen on a much bigger scale as tombs for pharaohs and nobility in Early Dynastic Egypt — will be floated out into the middle of the Serpentine. A team of Bulgarian divers will be on hand to make sure the concrete anchors are in the correct position, having first checked the bottom of the lake for unexploded World War II ordnance. On 17 June, “The Mastaba (Project for London, Hyde Park, Serpentine Lake)”, the newest work by the Bulgarian-American artist Christo, will be complete.
More correctly, it will be the newest work by Christo and JeanneClaude, the artist duo who had one of the great creative partnerships — not to mention love stories — of the last century.
Though they both dispensed with their surnames in their professional work, he was born Christo Vladimirov Javacheff on 13 June, 1935, in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, where his father owned a fabric factory and his political activist mother worked as a secretary at the Academy of Fine Arts in
‘For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught — nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!’ — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Sofia. She was born Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon — on the same day, in the same year — in Casablanca, Morocco, after her mother, who would later become the first female officer to enter liberated Paris in August 1944, was briefly married to a French general. Christo and Jeanne-Claude met in 1958, became lovers in, as will become apparent, a somewhat scandalous fashion, and began working together in 1961. Over the course of their collaboration, they have been responsible for some of the most ambitious, awe-inspiring and divisive art works ever made.
In 1972, they hung an orange curtain measuring 18,600sq m between two mountains in Colorado. In 1976, they ran a 40km fence of white nylon across the dusty fields of Northern California. In 1983, they surrounded 11 islands in Biscayne Bay, Miami, with skirts of hot-pink polypropylene fabric, so that they looked like Technicolor fried eggs. In 1995, they wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin in a 100,000sq m silvery shroud. In 2005, they placed 7,503 saffron fabric banners hanging from five-metre poles throughout Central Park in New York, creating golden pathways through the bare trees. All of these projects drew crowds in their thousands, sometimes millions. None of them existed for longer than 16 days.
Over 48 years, Christo and Jeanne-Claude realised 23 projects. They failed to get permission for 47. Their work has taken them into the very heart of power in many nations, with projects standing or falling at the whim of a president or a prime minister, a mayor or a sheikh. The cost of making the works has been immense, and entirely self-funded; the value of them incalculable.
In 2009, Jeanne-Claude died, aged 74, from complications relating to a brain aneurysm. Since her death, Christo has continued to work on projects that they conceived together. One of them, “The Floating Piers”, a network of bright yellow walkways allowing people to walk on water, they had proposed in 1970 for the Río de la Plata between Argentina and Uruguay. In 2016, Christo realised it on Lake Iseo in Lombardy, Italy, his first major project since Jeanne-Claude’s death. It was deemed a triumph — Forbes magazine called it “divine” — and 1.2m people came to see it: twice the number anticipated.
The London Mastaba is also based on an idea that he and JeanneClaude had had together: in 1968, they proposed a floating mastaba on Lake Michigan but were not granted permission. Its appearance in the British capital, however, is something of a surprise — the contract with Royal Parks was signed off only five days before construction commenced — though it will undoubtedly become one of the most talked about cultural events in Britain this year.
“Christo is an imaginative visionary who conceives big ideas and brings them to life with relentless determination,” said Michael R Bloomberg, chairman of the Serpentine Galleries, at the announcement of the London Mastaba; Bloomberg was also the mayor of New York who championed “The Gates” project in Central Park. “In New York, we’ve seen how his projects can benefit cities culturally and economically, and we’re excited that the Serpentine will be the site of his next work.”
Given that Hyde Park expects over 7m visitors in a normal summer, seven-figure audiences are all but guaranteed; and at 20m tall, with no trees to obscure it, it will be hard to miss. But who would want to?
While construction of the London Mastaba begins across the Atlantic, Christo has remained at his studio in SoHo, Manhattan, making preparatory sketches for the project, because, as he says, “I need to work to pay the bills!” His studio occupies the top space of a five-floor reddish-brown building built in the 1860s, which has a rust-coloured fire escape zigzagging down the front. Christo and Jeanne-Claude moved here in 1964, illegally at first — living in commercial lofts was not permitted in New York until 1971 — and eventually bought it from their landlord in 1973. Now it sits next to a branch of Agnès B and faces a fancy trainer shop. It belongs to an era of the city that is fading, though not gone.
Christo doesn’t have assistants and will not allow anyone into his studio — “It is not cleaned since 1964!” — so he receives visitors in a gallery space-cum-reception room on the first floor, which is hot as Hades thanks to boxy heaters against the walls that groan and creak as they pump out hot air supplied by the enormous generator in the basement that powers the whole building. The room has high ceilings and a tired, greenish-grey carpet which is starting to rumple in places, as though it were one of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s works. There are sculptures dotted about: swaddled tin cans, stacked oil barrels, a plastic-wrapped “package” that looks like a pregnant belly. The walls are covered with Christo’s drawings for projects, made and framed by his own hand: some completed, some abandoned, one still possible.
Images of Jeanne-Claude are strikingly apparent around the room, in photographs and on the cover of books on the bookcase and coffee table. Here she is in a photo taken in her later years, holding her husband’s hands, smiling, with her trademark flame-red hair. Here, a picture of an early work of Christo’s from 1963, a painting of Jeanne-Claude he wrapped in plastic, now yellowing, though her parted red lips and feline eyes still burn through.
They met in Paris when he was hired to paint several portraits of her mother, after he had escaped Communist Bulgaria for Prague and Vienna, coming to the French capital in 1958. Their romance was a lively one. He first became involved with her half-sister, Joyce; Jeanne-Claude meanwhile got engaged to another man but became pregnant with Christo’s child (legend has it their first kiss was so passionate that he broke a tooth). She went through with the marriage, but later said that even during her honeymoon she knew she had to end it: “I’m sure that instinctively my entire body called out to Christo.” Their son, Cyril, was born in 1960, and they married in 1962.
Jeanne-Claude’s nephew, Jonathan Henery, vice-president of Christo’s company, CVJ Corporation, goes to fetch him from upstairs. (There is a fair amount of family involvement: Vladimir Yavachev, director of operations who is overseeing construction of the London Mastaba, is Christo’s own nephew, son of his elder brother, Anani.)
Christo, when he arrives, has the energy of a coiled spring. Small, with a cumulonimbus of white hair around his ears, he wears glasses, a striped shirt, black trainers and jeans with a hole in the knee, cinched tight with a woven belt; clothes perhaps roomier than they once were. He chooses a harder chair over the sofa, and does not hesitate to detail his vigorous habits. “I’m living in this building you know since when? Fifty-four years. The same building. No elevators. I’m climbing 90 stairs every day. And I’m working standing. No stool in my studio.” (There are stair-lifts installed on the narrow flights of stairs, which Henery assures are only for transporting heavy boxes and suitcases.)
Christo became an American citizen in 1973, but his English still tumbles out in fragments. He also spoke French with Jeanne-Claude, and it occasionally peppers his speech and has melded with his still-heavy Bulgarian accent. He likes to answer questions with “No!” or sometimes, “No! No no no no!” which is alarming at first until you realise it is a reflex of sorts, perhaps the result of a lifetime of explaining, or justifying. And that he enjoys being challenged, something at which Jeanne-Claude was particularly adept: “This is mostly I’m missing,” he’ll say later. “She was the most critical person and I miss her all the time.”
Right now, his mind is fully absorbed by the project in London, and he is keen to convey quite what the people of Britain are in for. “You know how much it is? 500 tonnes! Floating!” he says, with evident delight. And later, of the sculpture’s height: “You know what that means, 20 metres? Go outside, walk on the next sidewalk — it’s the height of our building. They don’t understand how big it is! Ha!”
The London Mastaba will sit in the middle of the Serpentine Lake, so unlike many other of their projects, those who come will be encouraged to look but not touch. It will, however, be only about 15–20m from the
buoy line of the lake’s swimming area, and both rowing boats and pedalos will still be available to rent. And while two sides of the London Mastaba are sheer vertical faces, the other two are slanted, leading to a horizontal plane on top. Christo acknowledges the potential. “Actually, the biggest stairway. You can climb, you can walk,” he says. “Going to be tempted, someone will try to do that.”
And if they do? “Probably they should come down!”
The planning for the London Mastaba — what Christo likes to call the “software” phase, as opposed to the “hardware” phase of construction — was, at least by the standards he is used to, relatively straightforward. Permission was granted by Westminster City Council and a contract agreed with The Royal Parks, with the cooperation of other organisations including The Friends of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and BlueBird Boats, who rent out the pedalos and will patrol the water. The objections were minimal: some concerns were raised about water quality and irrigation, and Christo says, with some bewilderment, “They told me there was some first complaint was related for the swans?” The aim, though, as it has been with all their projects, is to leave the area in better condition than that in which they found it, by initiating cleaning and repairs. They usually rent the sites on which their works are made, though in the case of London they will be leaving a legacy. “Of money. Ha!” says Christo. “A legacy of money.”
In fact, London has been something of a cake-walk compared to earlier projects (not to mention, at an estimated £3m, relatively cheap; “Cheap is a word Christo doesn’t like,” his nephew Vladimir advises. “Maybe, inexpensive…”).
In 1985, they wrapped the Pont Neuf in Paris in 41,800sq m of golden polyamide fabric, but only after nine years of trying to secure the approval of Jacques Chirac, then mayor of the city, and eventually President Mitterrand and the French government. For “The Umbrellas” in 1991, a transpacific diptych in which 1,760 giant yellow parasols were dotted across coastal land in Northern California, and another 1,340 giant blue parasols placed in fields along the opposite coast in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan, they had to get permission from 25 private landowners (or “cowboy ranchers” as Christo describes them) on one side and 459 rice farmers on the other. As Christo remembers, “Jeanne-Claude was saying we drinking 6,000 cups of green tea!” Their proposal to wrap the Reichstag took 24 years to realise and was refused three times, before eventually being approved in a parliamentary vote. So opposed was German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who felt that it would demean the building, that he never went to see it, though an estimated 5m other people did.
Sometimes the years of lobbying and investment do not pay off. Since Jeanne-Claude’s death, Christo has made particularly prominent bids to realise two major projects that they had conceived together. But in January 2017, “Over the River”, a plan to suspend nearly six miles of silvery fabric over eight stretches of the Arkansas River in Colorado, collapsed spectacularly in a storm of environmental outrage and political intrigue.
Christo had faced down five years of law suits filed by a local group calling itself Rags Over the Arkansas River, or Roar, who cited numerous fears about the project ranging from the dangers posed by the large crowds who would come to see it to the plight of the resident longhorn sheep. Reporting on the negotiations in 2015, The Denver Post’s fine arts critic, Ray Mark Rinaldi, wrote that “Christo has endured the bureaucratic equivalent of waterboarding with a good attitude,” describing public meetings at which opponents had been “relentless and rude, insulting his hair and clothes,” and “making fun of his accent”.
Ultimately though, it wasn’t Roar who brought an end to “Over the River”, but Christo himself, instigated by the fact that, as of the start of this year, the rent money that he would be paying to the Bureau of Land Management (and had been paying since 2011) would be going to the Trump Administration. “I cannot do the project because the person change. I don’t even like to discuss, I don’t mention the name,” is all he’ll
say. “It’s simply a matter of human decisions: my project, I don’t like to be involved anymore.” He estimates the cost of the unrealised “Over the River” project to be around $14m.
The other project remains. If Christo realises it, it could prove to be his — or rather, their — greatest work. “Abu Dhabi Mastaba (Project for United Arab Emirates)” will be a scaled-up version of the London Mastaba. You might even say the Serpentine project is something of a run-through, a proof of concept; showing not only how majestic a stack of oil barrels can look, but also the kind of cultural impact it can have, and visitor numbers it can attract. “The UAE Mastaba project is one of the most ambitious, not to say audacious, projects Christo and Jeanne-Claude conceived in a career of ambitious and audacious projects,” says Paul Goldberger, former architecture critic for The New Yorker. “If it is ever realised I think it would have to rank among their most stunning achievements.”
The UAE Mastaba, which has been planned since 1977, making it the longest running unaltered project of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s partnership, will rest on sand, not water. Rather than the London Mastaba’s 7,506 barrels, it will be covered in 410,000 — more than 50 times as many. It will be 150m high, making it the largest sculpture ever made, a few metres taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza and with a footprint that, as Christo and his team like to tell you, would fit snugly into Saint Peter’s Square in the Vatican. Christo has estimated that it will cost £300m. It will be Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s only permanent large-scale work.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude first visited the UAE in 1979, after they managed to secure permission through the French foreign minister, Louis de Guiringaud, himself an art collector. They had been looking for a site for their Mastaba idea, which they had tried and failed to get permission to build in both Texas and Holland, and he suggested that the newly formed federation, which had only been established in 1971, might be receptive. They have been on a charm offensive ever since: before JeanneClaude’s death, they made numerous further trips to Abu Dhabi together, talking to rulers, dignitaries, students and school children. In 2012, Christo established “The Christo and Jeanne-Claude Award” to nurture artistic talent in the region, and show general goodwill. He still visits several times a year, and is due to return again in November.
The decision is currently in the hands of the Abu Dhabi Government. But Christo has mentioned in the past that Sheikha Shamsa bint Hamdan Al Nahyan, wife of Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, ruler of the western region of Abu Dhabi, is particularly keen, having been greatly moved by a memorial film about Jeanne-Claude that Christo had made in 2010 (she is also the patron of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Award). Since 2013, Christo has employed Albright Stonebridge Group, a global strategy firm set up by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, to keep the negotiations ticking along. “All these projects, the same thing: we need to find people who know these people,” he says. “We’re nobody.”
Christo says he doesn’t want to discuss its status, saying only that is “very advanced,” because “it is delicate things. It is very volatile situation. You know very well the Middle East is very volatile, generally.” (The Iran– Iraq War between 1980 and 1988 was one of the contributing factors to the protracted planning.)
The Mastaba for the UAE is also an astounding undertaking. It will take 30 months to build, and despite four decades of planning, negotiating and ingratiating, and rumours that a green light is imminent, it has still not been lit. In June of this year, Christo will turn 83. If he is going to make his and Jeanne-Claude’s masterwork happen in his own life time, he cannot waste a minute.
Christo’s dogged pursuit of his singular artistic impulses — all the glorious-yet-fleeting successes, all the maddening, agonising failures — place him, in character, somewhere between Sisyphus and Kubla Khan. So, too, have they placed him somewhat outside the conventional art world. He has never been represented by a gallery — “when I was very young probably I was happy to have gallery, but nobody was interested in my stuff!” — and as a result has found himself in possession of a huge
number of his own increasingly valuable works, which he keeps in a storage facility in Manhattan and a much larger one in Basel, Switzerland.
He and Jeanne-Claude also devised an unusually innovative financial model for their work. They set up CVJ Corporation, a holding company which creates subsidiary companies for each project, based in the country in which it is being made. At the same time, they secure a line of standby credit from a bank, collateralised against their collection of their own works, which ensures a smooth cash flow while CVJ pays for current projects by selling smaller sculptures, sketches, paintings and even complete exhibitions to private collectors and institutions. (To give an indication of price, in late April a Christo painting called “Double Shop Window”, white paint on Plexiglas, a single one in an edition of 65, sold at auction at Christie’s in Amsterdam for €7,500.
They have never accepted sponsorship (while the London Mastaba is up — for an unusually long period of three months — there will be a concurrent exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery about Christo and JeanneClaude’s work with barrels which will be sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies; Christo stresses that the Mastaba on the lake has received none of that funding), nor charged entry to see their works. It is a model that, Christo will proudly tell you, has become the subject of a case study by Harvard Business School, alongside others for Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. “I’m educated Marxist from communist Bulgaria escaping in 1957 to the west,” he says, “I’m using capitalist system to the very end.”
Likewise, he refuses to acknowledge the political interpretations of his work. The use of oil barrels, he says, began only because he was attracted to their cylindrical shape: “I find it very sculptural form”; this despite the fact that he and Jeanne-Claude once blocked a Parisian street with oil barrels in protest at the construction of the Berlin Wall. As far as he will tell you, the conceptual implications of piling up 410,000 of them in a country that has the seventh-largest oil reserves is neither here nor there. (In a recent interview, the British artist Cornelia Parker said: “That’s what I admire about Christo and Jeanne-Claude, that they wrapped up the Reichstag and then said it had nothing to do with politics. Although it obviously had.”)
Nor does he want to give any credence to the idea that he is trying to build something resembling a tomb, or that there might be some faintly gothic significance in the fact that it is also one of the last projects that he and Jeanne-Claude had been working on together, as though it were a latter-day Taj Mahal. “The Mastaba is not a tomb like people saying,” he says, “it’s a much older name, coming from the first urban civilisation in the world.” Which is true, although the one he has in mind is much closer to the dimensions of an Egyptian tomb than it is to a Mesopotamian mud bench. (He also says, with impish glee, that he has another project in the works that was conceived with Jeanne-Claude, “but I cannot tell you!”)
Four decades on he is still brimming with enthusiasm about the Abu Dhabi Mastaba’s potential impact: “a landmark structure”, as he describes it, “that will be like this incredible Islamic mosaic, you can’t believe it what it will be. And colour. Beaming with colour. This will not relate to anything you see in architecture today.” Despite the almost unfathomable expense, a bill which he will again foot, he says that once it is built he will give it as a gift to the people of Abu Dhabi. “If they like, they will own.” Also: it will have no meaning. “Nothing is as big that is not building. It is not anything, it is absolutely sculpture,” he says. “Irrational, totally useless, totally unnecessary. This is the most beautiful part.”
There is, of course, the question of whether or not the Abu Dhabi Mastaba, already continuing without Jeanne-Claude — the pair famously always flew in separate airplanes so that should one of them die in a crash, the other could still realise their work — could also go ahead without Christo. “There are some things that can be done without me. As you see, Mastaba, many projects can be done without me because they already designed.” And would he want that to happen? “No, I like to see it!” he says. “I need to be…” he stops. “I love to be there.”
Even as he edges into his mid-Eighties, Christo’s gaze is fixed forward. “I am in quite good health, I cannot complain or anything.” He chooses not to reflect. “Retrospective will be done when I am dead,” he says. “I don’t like to spend one moment of my life looking backwards.” He likes to talk only about the quantifiable — years, dimensions, costs — and tells me as our interview nears its end, “You can write anything philosophically, but please don’t misspell names, locations and places. Think I be very, very cross.”
Still, inherent in the work are many curious paradoxes which pose questions about the mind of their creator. On the one hand, by being financially self-sufficient, Christo has enormous mastery over his oeuvre, and the freedom to instigate projects of a scale and ambition of which most artists can only dream. On the other, he devises concepts that are, by their very nature, subject to the intricacies of bureaucratic structures and the whims of the very powerful, making them, at times, maddeningly beyond his control.
Each work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude can be interpreted as a gesture of extreme democratic generosity: providing a spectacle to the masses, a source of wonder, for no obvious gain other than aesthetic pleasure and the satisfaction of having achieved them. It can also be seen as an act of audacious and ruthless egoism: an individualistic artistic vision imposed upon a landscape, manipulating it in ways that should, perhaps, be beyond humble human capabilities.
Christo doesn’t mind which you choose. He shrugs off attempts to put him in an artistic tradition. “I like to do, and that’s all. And I do it my way. That’s all.” At times, he seems almost wilfully simplistic when he explains his artistic decisions, perhaps a reaction to the elitist obfuscation of traditional art spiel; when he announced the London Mastaba at the start of this year, he explained that the colours of the barrels — red and white stripes on the sides; red, blue and purple on the ends — were chosen to reflect the Union flag and British royalty (or as he puts it to me, “Of course, the Majesty love the mauve”).
His work, their work, he says, is about the here and now, as it always has been. “First thing you should know: we are working with the real things,” Christo says, taking off his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I do not know how to drive. I never learned to drive. I don’t like to talk on the telephone. I hate to talk and not see people. I do not understand anything of computer. I cannot understand anything that is virtual, not real. I like to have real kilometre, real wet, real dry, real wind, real fear, real joy. This almost unstoppable pleasure to have the sense. With these very real things. Only when we’re still alive. After that will be gone.”
With any luck, in a few years’ time, perhaps even less, a company calling itself Abu Dhabi Mastaba Ltd, or whatever the Emirati equivalent might be, will set up camp in the desert outside Abu Dhabi. There, several hundred engineers and builders, working on a concept devised by engineering professors at Hosei University of Tokyo in 2007, will erect 10 concrete towers, standing in two rows of five. Next, they will construct five flat sides and cover each in many thousands of oil barrels, their curved surfaces painted in orange and yellow stripes, with circular ends that erupt in a blaze of red lilac, light pink, pale brown, ruby red, bright yellow, cobalt blue, deep orange, pastel green, grass green and ivory. Once the barrels are in place, the sides will be raised on rails, up and over the 10 towers, in a single, miraculous feat of hydraulics, like a magician lifting a limp linen napkin into solid form.
Then, finally, after many decades of persistence and persuasion, many years of speculation, and many, many millions of dollars, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “Mastaba (Project for the UAE)” will be made real. Hopefully, a tiny figure, dwarfed by the magnitude of his creation, will be there to witness it.
The Mastaba (Project for London, Hyde Park, Serpentine), will be on display in Hyde Park, London, from 18 June to 23 September. The concurrent exhibition, Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Barrels and The Mastaba (1958–2018), will be on display at the Serpentine Gallery, London, from 19 June to 9 September; serpentinegalleries.org