Christo
Artist of the wrapped monuments.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin and the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in fabric and hung an orange curtain across a valley in Colorado.
Christo was born Christo Vladimirov Javacheff in 1935 in Gabrovo, Bulgaria. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia under the communist regime. In 1957 he fled to the West, and in 1958 he arrived in Paris. There he met Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, who had been born on the same day as him, 13 June 1935, in Casablanca. They became a couple and went on to work together for more than fifty years. For a long time only Christo’s name appeared on the works, but from the 1990s they stressed that everything was a joint effort.
In Paris Christo began wrapping objects such as bottles, cans and chairs in fabric and rope. In 1962 the couple blocked a street in Paris with a wall of stacked oil barrels as a comment on the Berlin Wall. In 1964 they moved to New York. Their projects soon grew ever larger, and they began wrapping buildings and entire landscapes.
In 1969 they wrapped a stretch of coastline near Sydney in Australia. In 1972 they hung a huge orange curtain across a valley in Colorado, and in 1976 they built Running Fence, a fence of white fabric almost 40 kilometres long, in California. In 1985 they wrapped the Pont Neuf in Paris, and in 1995 the German parliament building, the Reichstag, in Berlin, after more than twenty years of negotiations. In 2005 they installed The Gates in Central Park in New York, thousands of gates hung with saffron-coloured fabric.
The projects lasted only a few weeks and were then taken down. Obtaining permission often took many years, and the couple financed them entirely themselves by selling Christo’s sketches, collages and models. They wanted to create temporary beauty that makes people see familiar places with new eyes.
Jeanne-Claude died in 2009 and Christo in 2020. The following year, 2021, their last joint project was realised: the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. They are regarded as among the best-known artists in land art and installation art.