Vale Christo

1969 was a year when big things happened. Apollo 11 landed on the moon and mankind took a giant leap. The Woodstock music festival ran for three days in upstate New York. The Beatles recorded their final album, ‘Abbey Road’.  ‘Sesame Street’ and ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ screened on television. And ARPANET – the precursor to the internet – was launched. It was also the year that the husband-and-wife team, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, came to Australia and wrapped Little Bay in Sydney as their first major environmental project.

John Kaldor, a young textile designer from Sydney, had met Christo and Jeanne-Claude the previous year in New York and acquired a small wrapped work, ‘Package’. Impressed by the artists’ vision he invited them to Australia to give a lecture, but the artists had bigger ideas and proposed the concept for ‘Wrapped Coast’.

Christo Vladimirov Javacheff died last week at the age of 84 years. Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon had pre-deceased in 2009 aged 74 years. Together they created visually impressive, controversial and memorable big public artworks.

If you believe in fate, Christo and Jeanne-Claude were destined to be together. Born on the same day – June 13, 1935 – in different countries (Christo in Bulgaria and Jeanne-Claude in Morocco) they met in Paris when Christo was commissioned to paint a portrait of Jeanne-Claude’s mother. Jeanne-Claude would soon marry Phillipe Planchon but shortly before the wedding she was pregnant with Christo’s child and would leave Planchon immediately after their honeymoon.

Christo had studied art from a young age – first privately and then at the Sofia Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1950s. Initially he pursued realistic painting and painted Soviet propaganda which he did not enjoy. Fleeing Bulgaria in 1956, he became stateless and ended up in Vienna where he continued his studies at the Vienna Fine Arts Academy. A visit to Switzerland in 1957 transformed his art practice and he began to wrap things from 1958 onward, starting with a paint can. He moved to Paris in February 1958 and met Jeanne-Claude in October of that year. The couple moved to New York in 1964 and, in 1973 after 17 ‘stateless years’, Christo became an American citizen.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s first collaboration was in Cologne in 1961 where they showed wrapped items, oil barrels and ephemeral large-scale works. This was followed by a show in Paris in 1962 where the pair blocked an alley with 240 barrels for several hours. Following their move to New York, they created Store Fronts (wooden facades made to resemble shop windows) and in Documenta IV in Kassell in 1968, they installed ‘5,600 Cubicmeter Package’ which was the largest ever inflated structure without a skeleton. It was in Kassell that John Kaldor would first see their work.

Sydney’s Little Bay ‘Wrapped Coast’ (1969) is very well documented by John Kaldor and was the first piece for Kaldor Public Art Projects. Information, including a video of the project and an interview with Christo from 2011, can be found at: http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/projects/project-01-christo-and-jeanne-claude?gclid=Cj0KCQjwlN32BRCCARIsADZ-J4s68Dr_Jn0hH3oS_8IuTAe8QAusEqaoxQ7Pk6t09oKD0mUSnSTKNO4aAonREALw_wcB

Christo and Jeanne-Claude would go on to create large-scale, site-specific environmental installations over the following decades. This would include ‘Valley Curtain’ in 1972 (an orange curtain across the Colorado State Highway); ‘Running Fence’ in 1976 (a 24.5 mile white nylon fence running through the Californian landscape); ‘ Pont Neuf’ in 1985 (the wrapping of the bridge in Paris for two weeks); ‘Wrapped Reichstag’  in 1995, (100,000 square metres fabric draping the German parliament); ‘The Gates’ in New York in 2005 (7,503 gates of saffron-coloured fabric in Central Park); and ‘The London Mastaba’ in 2018 (7,505 oil barrels arranged in the shape of an ancient Mesopotamian bench) floating on The Serpentine in London.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude developed the projects together – with Christo creating the preliminary sketches. The works were then installed by a range of technical experts and assistants. For example, ‘Wrapped Coast’ took more than 100 workers (including 15 professional mountain climbers) more than 17,000 hours to complete.  These projects required years (sometimes decades) of preparation and involved technical solutions, political negotiations, environmental approval and public persuasion.  The artists financed the projects themselves through the sale of their own artwork – refusing grants, scholarships and donations.

While the artists were in Australia, they also created ‘Wool works’ at the National Gallery of Victoria in November 1969. This consisted of two stacks of wool bales wrapped in tarpaulin and bound with ropes, with a smaller row of bales located nearby. This project was not without controversy and is well-discussed by Frances Lindsay in ‘Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Wool works at the National Gallery of Victoria’ in Art Journal 50, 2013: https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/christo-and-jeanne-claude-wool-works-at-the-national-gallery-of-victoria/ The drawing ‘Project for Keith Murdoch Court, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1969’ was finally acquired by the NGV in 2010.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude maintained that their projects contained no deeper meaning than the immediate aesthetic impact. For them, the purpose of their art was about joy, beauty and new ways to see the familiar. One Australian designer who was influenced by their work was Peter Tully in his creation of the ‘Christo Australia, brooch‘.

Christo’s final work is yet to be realised. ‘L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped’ will involve wrapping the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in 30,000 square metres of silvery blue polypropylene and 7,000 metres of red rope. Originally scheduled for the European Autumn this year (and deferred due to COVID-19), it will now take place from mid-September to early October 2021 – a fitting end to an extraordinarily big creative life.