Christo, who alongside his wife Jeanne-Claude became famous for his sculptures on monumental proportions, has died at 84. The news was announced on the artist’s official Twitter page. The couple were best known for wrapping in fabric some of the most iconic buildings and structures in the world, not least a vast stretch of the Sydney coastline in 1968, the Pont-Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris, in 1985, and the Reichstag in Berlin in 1995.
Born Christo Vladimirov Javacheff in 1935 to a bohemian family in Gabrovo, a small town in the Bulgarian mountains, the artist witnessed the Nazi occupation of the country during World War II and then that of the victorious Red Army. Studying art in Sofia, he found himself under pressure to produce Soviet propaganda. He found the political situation no less suffocating after moving to Prague to study theatre design. In 1957 he defected to the West – stowing away on a train to Vienna. In 1958, he arrived in Paris. There he encountered a 1920 work by Man Ray, L’Enigme d’Isidore Ducasse, a sewing machine wrapped in a blanket and tied in string.
Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s the artist made a series of similar objects, wrapping a variety of everyday objects including magazines, telephones and motorbikes, as well paint cans and bottles. In 1967 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, who had met in 1958 in Paris, created Wrapped Fountain in Spoleto, Italy. It was her influence that led Christo to working on a bigger scale: five years prior, with a nod to Christo’s politics, they blocked off the Rue Visconti in Paris with a pile of oil drums some 4 metres high (Rideau de fer, 1962), a work that intended to demonstrate to Parisian audiences the realities of life in Berlin. The work, done without permission, was dismantled by the police.
As their fame grew, however, authorities not only became more open to their ever-grander proposals but would actively encourage projects that proved PR opportunities. In 1991 they created a forest of 3,100 sun umbrellas that were simultaneously opened in valleys in Ibaraki, Japan, and California, USA. Christo continued the couple’s work after Jeanne-Claude’s death in 2009. In 2016 The Floating Piers enabled visitors to walk to an island in Italy’s Lake Iseo across reams of stretched yellow fabric. And in 2018, the artist created a giant floating sculpture for the Serpentine lake in London. In September 2021, a plan originally conceived by the artist in 1962 to wrap the Arc de Triomphe will finally come to fruition. The Parisian landmark is to be covered in 25,000 square metres of recyclable polypropylene fabric in silvery blue, and 7,000 metres of red rope.
