Artists & Works

STYLE: Homage to Picasso, Total Art

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are widely known for their public art projects. In some of the most famous works, they have wrapped various objects and structures in large sheets of fabric, securing the wrapped structures with rope. Their projects have been both big and small, and include the Wrapped Coast, Little Bay, Australia, 1968-69, in which a mile and a half stretch of seashore was wrapped in erosion control fabric, and The Pont Neuf Wrapped, Paris, 1975-1985, in which a twelve-arch 1607 bridge and its accompanying street lamps, sidewalks, and curbs, were wrapped in golden polyamide fabric. The artists have also created entirely new structures, such as Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972-76, a twenty-four and a half mile fence made of white nylon fabric, steel cable and poles, guy wires, and earth anchors. All traces of the public works are removed soon after completion. All costs for creating the huge projects are borne by the artists.

These graceful, imposing works can be seen as large sculptures, or as radical interruptions of the natural or built environment. The viewer is guided into a reinterpretation of natural and manmade objects, and scenic vistas, perhaps paying more attention to underlying shapes, perhaps engaging the beauty of a natural landscape in a way never before possible. In any case, the intent of the artists is to create "joy and beauty."

Wrapped Sylvette is a typical example of a preparatory drawing/collage made during the planning process for a large public project. These drawings, collages, and scale models are works of art in their own right. Wrapped Sylvette-Project for Washington Square Village, New York, refers to a project to wrap Bust of Sylvette, a monumental sculpture by Picasso owned by New York University's Grey Art Gallery. The sculpture is installed in NYU's University Plaza. Wrapped Sylvette, and many of the other preparatory works for other projects, have been released in limited print editions. Wrapped Sylvette's relevance to Picasso is clear.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

David D. Galloway, Art in America,  11/95
"The ultimate realization of a scheme Christo conceived in 1961 for packaging a public building ("perhaps a free-standing parliament building"), the Wrapped Reichstag almost certainly marks his final engagement with an existing architectural work. Recent projects, like those planned for New York's Central Park and for a section of the Rio Grande River in New Mexico, seek their orientation in the natural world, as indeed most of the artist's major projects have done in the past: Wrapped Coast, 1969; Valley Curtain, 1972 [see A.i-A., May-June 72]; Running Fence, 1976 [A.i.A, Nov.-Dec. '76]; Surrounding Islands (1983) and the 3,000 Umbrellas, Japan-U.S.A., 1991 [A.i.A., Mar. '92]. All of those projects inevitably carried some degree of political implication, like it or not, but this was largely subordinate to their esthetic and environmental dimensions; the real politics came in negotiating with legislators and government agencies to obtain the necessary permits-experience that served Christo well when he resumed intensive lobbying of the Bundestag in 1993. A building, especially one with a problematic past, brings its own predetermined values to the work. Wrapped, the Reichstag had a resonance throughout the world, seeming literally to preen for the television cameras. Unwrapped, it has now been returned to the German people to whom it was originally dedicated, though the populist inscription "Dem deutschen Volke" (To the German People) above the main entrance was only added in 1916."

Interview with Christo and Jeanne-Claude by James Pagliasotti, 1/4/02,
from christojeanneclaude.net
"Jeanne-Claude:
Christo and I believe that labels are very important, but for bottles of wine, not for artists, and we usually don’t like to put a label on our art.  If one is absolutely necessary, then it would be environmental artists because we work in both the rural and the urban environment.
... Christo: 
People think our work is monumental because it’s art, but human beings do much bigger things: they build giant airports, highways for thousands of miles, much, much bigger than what we create.  It appears to be monumental only because it’s art.  We have created indoor installations inside museums, like the Wrapped Floor at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1968, and not monumental at all by any standards. 
... Eye-level:
The cost of constructing your work is enormous, yet you accept no sponsorship, no commissions nor any public funds.  Nor do you accept volunteers, but rather pay everyone who works with you.  All of the cost reportedly is borne by the sales of your drawings for the project.  You have said that ensuring your freedom and the integrity of your work are the reasons you do things this way, but one nevertheless assumes that artists of your stature could negotiate a sponsorship agreement that was free of constraints.  Is your position in this matter polemical, or is the process of financing your work as you do an integral part of your art?
Christo: 
There are a few mistakes in your question.  First, it is not the drawings of that project that pays for the expenses of that project.  We sell everything we have, from the early packages and wrapped objects of 1958 that we have in our storages, and any preparatory drawings for any project that we have available, we sell them and it pays for the expenses of one project.  So, it’s not only the preparatory works for one project.  That wouldn’t be possible.
...Jeanne-Claude:
...We will never wrap a bridge again as we did in 1985 in Paris when we wrapped the Pont Neuf, the 400 years old bridge.  We will never wrap a bridge again.  We will never build Umbrellas again.  We will never wrap a parliament again.  We will never do a Valley Curtain or a Running Fence.  We will never surround any islands, as we did in Florida in 1983, when we surrounded 11 islands with pink floating fabric in Biscayne Bay, Miami, Florida.  We will never do again the same."