With his wife, Jeanne-Claude, the artist has realized mammoth feats, like surrounding islands with pink plastic -- and charming legions of stodgy bureaucrats
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The artist is a lean 65-year-old in blue jeans, a safari jacket, and old-fashioned black-rimmed glasses. He and his wife, who is also his work partner of four decades, are sitting on stage in folding chairs, making a presentation in the late afternoon of Nov. 5 at Northwestern University. They've probably given the same talk a thousand times before, and they're at ease in their roles.
He's the artist who can't be bothered with money, and she's the tough one who deals with the accountants and keeps things organized. But she has an outrageous head of frizzy hair dyed shocking red, and is just as funny and relaxed and impossibly idealistic as he is. Every once in a while, they shoot each other an amused look, as if they're astonished, after all these years, to still be together, doing what they do and getting paid for it.
This is the team known as Christo and Jeanne-Claude, one of the most famous artistic collaborations of our time. They work in fabric -- acres and acres of fabric. They're the ones who in 1976 built a 24 1/2-mile-wide, 18-foot-high fence that meandered through rural Sonoma and Marin counties in California and ended in the Pacific Ocean. In 1983, they surrounded 11 islands in Key Biscayne, Fla., with 6 1/2 million square feet of hot pink polypropylene. In 1985, they wrapped the Pont Neuf in Paris in 440,000 square feet of polyamide fabric. Since then, they've installed 3,100 giant umbrellas simultaneously in Japan and California, wrapped the Reichstag building in Berlin in a million square feet of fabric, and created a wall of 13,000 empty oil barrels in Oberhausen, Germany.
"GENTLE DISTURBANCE." Their 22 unrealized works are probably as well known as the 18 that they've actually managed to build. You may have seen reproductions of drawings Christo did for an early, failed project to wrap two Manhattan skyscrapers -- No. 2 Broadway and 20 Exchange Place -- in fabric. "After two weeks of negotiations, the owners of the buildings concluded we were lunatics, so we only have drawings of that project," Jeanne-Claude recalls. Another time, NASA called to ask if they wanted to do something in outer space. Christo and Jeanne-Claude thought it over and said no. They only work in spaces that have been shaped by human beings, they said.
I thought their art was little more than a series of media stunts until I happened to see one of the projects firsthand. I had just moved to Paris in 1985, when they wrapped the Pont Neuf, which spans the Seine at the western end of Isle de la Cité, not far from Notre Dame cathedral. I lived about half a mile away, and I used to walk over at night. I was astonished by how the simple act of wrapping this familiar structure in mustard-beige fabric could change one's perceptions of it: Footsteps were muffled, and the street lamps were eerie and odd. It was if someone had taken one of those department-store window Christmas displays and done it up life-size. Deep into the night, people kept coming to walk around on the canvas, enchanted by the effect.
As Christo notes, the environment of a big city -- the stop signs and street lights, the straight streets and formally designed buildings -- is very tightly structured. "We like to borrow that space and create a gentle disturbance for a few days," he says. He tells a story about how Rodin actually did two versions of his famous sculpture of novelist Honoré de Balzac. The first was of the writer naked, with his big belly, spindly legs, and all the other details of his anatomy exposed. Then, Christo says, Rodin covered this first work in liquid plaster and sculpted great robes around it to create a second version -- the one we know today. "That's what we do," he says.
TORN CURTAIN. One big difference, however, is that all of Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's works are temporary, designed to stay up for only two weeks. "We wish to create works of joy and beauty," Jeanne-Claude says. "We want to see them because we believe they will be beautiful. And the only way to see them is to build them."
Sometimes, they last even less than two weeks. In 1972, a giant orange curtain the pair hung between two mountains in Colorado was torn in half by a gale after little more than a day. The works also are designed to leave the least possible mark on the environment. The artists use industrial materials that are recycled into their original uses once the piece comes down. "We want to work in total freedom," Jeanne-Claude says. "We insist on doing what we want, where we want -- though not necessarily when we want."
They fund their work entirely out of money generated by the drawings and collages Christo does to document each project
I had always assumed that Christo and Jeanne-Claude were supported by money from companies and governments. Not so, they say. They never take commissions and never do ideas suggested by someone else. They take no grants or royalties from the photos, posters, and memorabilia associated with their projects. They have their own engineer and lawyer, and accept no volunteer help. All the legions of people who help construct their works are paid either slightly above minimum wage or scale wages for union workers. If you want to know more about their philosophy, check out their Internet site at christojeanneclaude.net.
They say they fund their work entirely out of money generated by the drawings and collages Christo does to document each project. Christo often works segments of the project's fabric into the drawings to form a collage. The couple lives frugally, in the same lower Manhattan apartment they've been in since emigrating to the U.S. from Paris in 1964. Their slide show includes a shot of the "studio" from which Christo churns out his drawings -- a cramped, pantry-size room in their apartment. He does a lot of drawings: He claims to work 15 hours a day, seven days a week. They say they never take vacations.
SOVIET SOURCES. They save money by acting as their own art dealers. Collectors, museum officials, and gallery owners come and visit them in New York, buying sketches directly from them. Prices have risen over the years. A sketch of the California fence project is expected to sell for $40,000 to $60,000 at a Christie's auction in New York on Nov. 16. But I suspect that the new drawings Christo does to fund current activities go for considerably less. After all, who knows if a project is ever going to be built or not?
The two seem to think it was destiny that they should meet to do this work. They claim to have been born at exactly the same time on exactly the same June day in 1935, he in Bulgaria and she in Casablanca. His family name is Javacheff, hers de Guillebon. The son of an industrialist, Christo was a natural artist who started drawing at age 6. Jeanne-Claude was born into a French military family. They met in Paris in 1958, when he did a portrait of her mother. "I was a spoiled brat," she recalls. "I became an artist out of love for him. If he had been a dentist, I would have become a dentist."
Christo had the harder early life. The harsh Bulgarian communist regime, he recalls, imposed "Socialist Realism," the propaganda art style mandated by Stalin, on the country's artists. "The professors from the Soviet Union, most of them about the age I am now, would come and school us in Socialist Realism," he recalls. "But when they got drunk on vodka in the evening, they would all talk about the great period of Soviet [avant-garde] art in the 1920s." Christo escaped to the West in the late 1950s. But he says those artists who created the brief flowering of the Soviet avant-garde before being squashed by a totalitarian government are still his greatest inspiration.
The big problem with Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's style of art is getting permission to do it. They spend
Why do officials sign off on these outrageous schemes? I'd like to believe they do it out of a sense of fun
years, and sometimes decades, hammering away at authorities to win the necessary approvals. When New York City turned down one of their ideas, the denial ran to 150 pages. The approval from Japanese bureaucrats of the artists' plan to erect 1,340 19-foot, 8-inch umbrellas in Ibaraki was just as lengthy. "All of our projects have two distinct periods -- the hardware and the software," Christo says. "In the software period, [the work] only exists in our minds and in the minds of all the thousands of people who try to stop us. The hardware period -- physicality -- is the most enjoyable. The sun, the wind, the rain, and the light" all come into play.
IS IT ART? They currently have at least two works in progress. One they've been working on since 1980 would involve putting fabric down on paths throughout New York's Central Park. Another one, for which they're been working on approvals since 1992, involves draping a canopy over a section of the Arkansas River that runs through Colorado. Environmental impact hearings are over, so that one seems fairly likely to happen in the next year or two.
Why do dour German ministers, nit-picking Japanese bureaucrats, and all the other officials ultimately sign off on so many of Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's outrageous schemes? It may be wishful thinking, but I'd like to believe they do it out of a sense of fun. Lord knows public life everywhere in the world lacks a sense of playfulness. I like to imagine that the functionaries get a secret thrill out of being able to finally give the public a little joy at no cost to the public till.
After Christo and Jeanne-Claude finished their talk at Northwestern's Block Museum, they autographed posters and gave them away to attendees. I posed a question to Jeanne-Claude that an artist friend of mine had been curious about: Have the pair ever had a project rejected on aesthetic grounds? Has any government simply turned a project down on the grounds that it's bad art? "Oh yes," she says brightly as she signs her name to a poster. "It happens all the time that people say, 'You can't do it because what you do isn't really art.' But, of course, they only say that before we do a project." Afterwards, I suspect, even the most cold-hearted bureaucrats conclude, as I did in Paris in 1985, that it really is art of the highest order.
Peterson is a contributing editor at Business Week Online. Follow his weekly Moveable Feast column, only on BW Online Edited by Beth Belton
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