Christo, About the Arc de Triomphe
On February 19th, 2020, shortly before the pandemic flared up in New York, Christo still spoke with a tender “we” about Jeanne-Claude, his great life companion. As if she were still by his side, eleven years after her death. The 84-year-old Christo, who died on May 31st, 2020, two weeks before his 85th birthday, told us at his home in Manhattan how he had prepared the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe, postponed until autumn 2021 (September 18th—October 3rd, 2021), and the exhibition Christo et Jeanne-Claude, Paris! at the Centre Pompidou (which was held during the summer and autumn 2020). Given the long tube he was dragging behind him, which fed him with oxygen, everything suggested that the Paris project would be his last legacy, his testament. He seemed to suspect that he would only witness its realisation from afar, if he ever saw it. He had prepared everything down to the last detail, so much so that his presence wasn’t necessary. On the other hand, time was short and he was using it to do drawings to finance the project. The idea that things might stop for him probably never occurred to him. He gave the impression that nothing was lost yet, and that everything was just beginning. The twenty minutes he had planned to devote to me extended to an hour and a half, even though he was in the middle of preparations. H.-N. J.
After the wrapping of the Pont-Neuf in 1985,the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe is your second Parisian project, a dream you’ve long cherished, and which is now coming true. It came about without warning. The proposal itself dates back to 1961, but the agreement came about quite suddenly. I never thought it would be possible, and with this unexpected decision I’ve only a year and a half to prepare and create the works that’ll finance the project. We had 10 years for the Pont-Neuf (1985), 24 years for the Reichstag (1995), which was rejected three times. I had to make 600 original works for that project. From very small sketches to large models. We had to wait 26 years for The Gates (New York, 2005), after we kept coming up against obstacles. Jeanne-Claude used to say: “We don’t display patience, but passion.” As you know, one of our unshakeable principles is to finance everything without outside help. The sale of drawings for the Arc deTriomphe project, the first of which was completed in 2017, is to cover the entire cost.
What exactly happened for the Arc de Triomphe project to materialise so unexpectedly? I owe everything to Bernard Blistène, the director of the Centre Pompidou, and especially to Laure Martin. (1) Surely you know them. A wonderful, tough woman who’s very involved in the Parisian art scene, and who also worked on the PontNeuf project. She visited me in New York in the autumn of 2015, and we talked about the possibility of an exhibition. And it was she who passed on my wish to Blistène. Shortly afterwards I went to Paris to talk to her about it.
Initially, only an exhibition was planned. How and when did the idea for the Arc de Triomphe project come about? It was in 2017, when I told Blistène about the exhibition Christo et Jeanne-Claude, Paris !, which recounts our Parisian period between 1958 and 1964, including the history of the project The Pont-Neuf Wrapped, Paris, 1975-85. He proposed a project in front of the building. He was thinking of Brancusi’s studio. Smiling at him in a friendly manner, I told him that if I wanted to do something in Paris, it shouldn’t be a new project, but one that hadn’t yet been done in Paris. When Laure came to see me in New York in June 2017, she asked me if I wanted to cover the statue of Louis XIII on Place des Vosges. “No,” I said, “there’s only one project that really excites me, and that’s the Arc de Triomphe. France has a young, smart, bold president who’ll understand and welcome such a project. It’s still a big dream.”
Why? As you know, in 1956, during the Hungarian revolution in Budapest, I fled west via Prague at the age of 21, without a penny in my pocket. I was stateless. At that time I only spoke Russian and Hungarian. I aspired to go to Paris, the artistic metropolis of the time. I first landed in Vienna, the refugee hub.There I came into contact with representatives of the United Nations, whom I painted portraits of because I needed money to get to Geneva, where the UN headquarters is located. And I spent six months there until I got the provisional papers, which a UN officer had helped me get, to come to Paris. I’d met him in Geneva. I also met the Frenchman Jean de Cabarusse, whose wife and child I also painted. With the papers finally in my possession in 1958, Monsieur de Cabarusse offered to rent a maid’s room in Paris from his grandfather. There was no running water or toilet, but it was certainly not the worst place to sleep to begin with. At the time, I didn’t know that chambre de bonne was a servant’s room.
TANKS
How did you arrive in Paris? I arrived by train at the Gare de Lyon, with a suitcase in each hand, and took a taxi. As I’d learnt some French in Geneva, I was able to communicate with the driver. When I got to the Champs-Élysées, I was afraid. Suddenly, without my expecting it, tanks appeared everywhere I looked. It seemed as though war was imminent. My arrival coincided with the day the French called on General de Gaulle. In Algeria, on May 13th, 1958, the ‘Putsch d’Alger’ had taken place, the coup by the French military against the newly formed government in Paris under Pierre Pflimlin, President of the Council of Ministers. That day I saw the Arc de Triomphe with my own eyes for the first time.
At that time you hadn’t wrapped any buildings yet. It was only in 1961, three years after I first met Jeanne-Claude, that we started making artworks in public spaces, and one of the ideas was to wrap a public building. In the attic room I lived in near the Arc deTriomphe in 1962, I made a photomontage of the building being wrapped. I made other sketches, like a collage, in 1988.
The project, like many others, remained in the drawers for years. Yes, in 50 years, out of a total of 47 projects, 23 have been completed. Some we would have liked to do, and some we abandoned. We got permission for some, but we lost interest in them over the years. On the other hand, the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe has remained an unfulfilled wish which, after 60 years, postponed for a year because of the pandemic, will finally be realised next September [editor’s note: 2020, then 2021].The Arch that Napoleon had built in 1806 in honour of the revolutionary armies will be wrapped with 25,000 square metres of blue-grey recyclable polypropylene fabric and 3,000 metres of red rope. At the time of its construction, in those turbulent years of the 19th century, the Arc de Triomphe was a powerful symbol of the relationship between France and Germany and the rest of Europe. In fact, it was previously covered with fabric. Ironically, Vic
tor Hugo’s burial ceremony took place there in front of 2.5 million people, the largest ceremony Paris has ever seen. At the time, they covered part of the arch with black crepe.
Why blue? We wanted a colour that’d match the French flag. But it’s also a colour I like and use in drawing. The fabric has a thick blue fibre. We use a very heavy industrial textile, almost as heavy as carpet. The twill fabric has a special metallic quality. Using a technique developed by a German company, aluminium is sprayed onto the fabric. Because of the special weave and the fact that the fibres are round, you can see the blue radiating from the filigree folds. In addition to blue, there’s also silver and red. It’s not just a blue, but a blue with silver shining through. Its metallic reflections beautifully highlight the contrasts between light and shadow.
Will the impression be different from a project like the Pont-Neuf? Because the arch is located on a hill and there are constant, extremely strong winds blowing through the arches, it was necessary to carry out wind tunnel tests. Unlike the Pont-Neuf or the Reichstag, the fabric will undulate a lot. The
Arc deTriomphe will be a living object in perpetual motion. The external conditions force us to extend the dimensions, as the fabric requires a certain flexibility. In order not to touch any of the architectural elements, a complex system of scaffolding will cover the arch and augment its volume.
A TASTE FOR THE TEMPORARY
How do you test everything down to the smallest detail to make such a project happen and make the seemingly impossible feasible? On the one hand, everything’s simulated on the computer, including the way the fabric reacts to the wind, because nothing must go wrong on the opening day. The timetable is meticulously planned, and has to be followed to the letter. We were also able to recreate half of the Arc de Triomphe on a huge site in Bagneux, on the outskirts of Paris, and use it to test the stability and efficiency of all these elements with equipment and ropes. The people from the construction company who are carrying out the project are used to working on wind turbines. It’s the same company that was entrusted with the implementation of the Pont-Neuf project.
When you expressed your wish to wrap the Arc de Triomphe, did you think it would come true? No, not at all. I even thought that Blistène wasn’t seriously considering the project. But just three days after our meeting his assistant called us to tell us that we had an appointment with Mr Philippe Bélaval, the president of the Centre des monuments nationaux. When we spoke to him, he suggested he would see Emmanuel Macron. Thanks to the tenacious commitment of Bélaval, Blistène and Serge Lasvignes, the president of the Centre Pompidou, Emmanuel Macron authorised the wrapping at the beginning of 2019. The fond memory of the Pont-Neuf, which left a lasting impression on all those who saw it, probably had something to do with it.
You’re preparing the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe from New York. Yes, normally I’d fly back and forth between here and Paris, but I don’t have the time because I work on my drawings every day in the studio. Fortu
nately, my nephew Vladimir Yavachev helps me out. He, who already assisted me with The Floating Piers in Italy, is the project manager. He takes care of everything on site, represents me, and Laure Martin is the president. My presence in Paris isn’t necessary because the project is already finished. The test we put all our projects through took place last autumn.
Your major projects never last more than three weeks. What’s the origin of this inclination toward the temporary? First of all, these works are absolutely irrational. Nobody needed Valley Curtain (Colorado, 197072), The Surrounded Islands (Florida, 1983), Wrapped Reichstag or The Pont-Neuf Wrapped. All these projects are completely useless and without interest, in the sense that everyone can live without them. Nevertheless, they existed for a short time. Only Jeanne-Claude and I need them.They’re designed from the start to be there only temporarily, if only because of the fabric used, which is nomadic. What matters most to me is that something happens at a given moment in my life. And this cannot be kept, sold, used or appropriated. Such a work is free, and no collector can or should physically own it. Because the work’s too complex. It might well stay there if it were made of a different material. But the very fact that these are public buildings that are wrapped rules out a permanent existence for the work. What matters to me is that the project takes place at a specific moment in my life and in the lives of others, and that this moment can’t be cut, bottled or repeated. The fact that these works are limited to only three weeks increases their impact. They’re perceived more intensely because of their brevity, because they have to be experienced. Moreover, art’s alive. And if it’s alive, it has to die.
It’s as if with each project you create a temporary home in another country, like a nomad who pitches his tent. What I build isn’t a home, it’s a visual, physical experience. All my projects are about reality. It’s very different from video or film. The three kilometres of floating walkways for The Floating Piers were real walkways, covered in fabric, that visitors actually walked on. They faced real water, real wind, real dangers. In Running Fence (California, 1976) you could physically walk 40 kilometres.
What’s important to you in all these projects? Their duration. All these projects have a software phase and a hardware phase.The software phase is the least intensive, it’s where we deal with the authorisation. In 1972, when the idea for the Reichstag wrapping came to us, I couldn’t tell you what the
Reichstag was. It was only in the 25 years leading up to its realisation that I understood what the wrapped meant. Every project has developed its identity in the period leading up to its being carried out.
What do you mean by identity? In some cases we had to rent the location where we did the project. Because there isn’t a square metre in the world that doesn’t belong to someone. At the beginning of everything the question arises: who owns the site? Who can give us permission? Or: where do we get it? Until a project comes to fruition, something unpredictable can always happen, or something can change.
Do you see your projects as utopias before they come true? Absolutely not. It has nothing to do with utopia, because projects are feasible. They come true. Utopia is connected to something impossible. The projects we do, on the other hand, are banal, downright primitive, and have nothing to do with the miracle of technology. I attach great importance to the fact that they’re extremely simple, because the world’s already full of complicated things. Getting a permit is another story, and smacks of the impossible. Nobody imagined that the Reichstag would be wrapped one day. We had to defeat Chancellor Kohl.That’s what makes such a project so exciting. But it is difficult to find engineers who think ‘simply’. That you can walk on water like Jesus is what excited the visitors to The Floating Piers.
DOCUMENTATION
How long does the construction phase of such projects as the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe last? It’s relatively short, because we don’t build a building stone by stone.The parts of a project are delivered in the order in which they are needed for the construction. And the material’s chosen according to its workability, so it can be used quickly. These projects, which have nothing to do with paintings or sculptures, are very close to architecture. We use the same means as engineers to build motorways or bridges, and we employ the same professionals. In addition to engineers, we also have lawyers working for us.
What happens to all the documents and remnants of the project? To answer this question, I have to go further. For big projects like The Gates, Running Fence, Valley Curtain, The Umbrellas (California and Japan, 1984-91), there was very detailed documentation in the form of exhibitions. For each project I do many drawings to sell. I put some aside to keep. After each project Jeanne-Claude and I kept the related things, including the original material used to make the projects, models, photos, sketches, drawings, collages, documents, all the correspondence and much more. Usually, each of the temporary works was documented by a multitude of such items, up to 350 pieces for one exhibition. In the case of The Umbrellas, there were even 500 pieces. Since Wrapped Coast in Australia (1969), we’ve had all the documentary material stored in Basel. We asked ourselves the same question: “What do we do with all this?
And the answer is? In 1972 Jeanne-Claude said that part of our job was to find a home for the archive with all the documents in the important collections. To sell each document as a whole, to continue to build up a whole.
Is it about preserving traces for posterity? You could say that. The first opportunity came in the same year. The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. acquired the complete documentation of our Running Fence project carried out in California in 1976. In 2015, a year before The Floating Piers in Italy, the Foundation for the Exhibition of the Wrapped Reichstag Documentation, founded by Roland Specker and which helped us a lot in the process of authorisation and realisation of the project, succeeded in securing the entire documentation consisting of almost 400 pieces. Thanks to the generous loan of the entrepreneur Lars Windhorst, who had acquired it, and thanks to the support of the German Bundestag, an exhibition of the documentation has been on permanent display on the presidential level of the Reichstag building since then.
One last question: do you ever think about death? No, I’ll be 85 in June, and I’ve enjoyed every moment of my life. I’ve had such incredible moments, like the time I spoke before 459 Japanese people, and made them laugh without the help of a translator.
What does the thought of death provoke in you? I’m not religious, nor was JeanneClaude. What was important to me was that she didn’t suffer when she died of an aneurysm. I don’t want to suffer either. I would rather kill myself.
Heinz-Norbert Jocks is a correspondent for Kunstforum International. He is the author of books on Günther Uecker and Group Zero. He lives in Paris and Düsseldorf.
1 Editor’s note: Bernard Blistène was director of the Musée national d’art moderne from 2013 to 2021 (see the interview with him in this issue). We also published an interview with Christo by Blistène in our issue no. 476 (April 2020).