A Tribute to Christo’s Unforgettable Art Works
2020In projects such as “The Pont Neuf Wrapped,” Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, made staggering, ephemeral works of contemporary art.
Photograph by Chris
Steele-Perkins / Getty
For many years, I’ve
wondered whether it was Christo’s naïvité, the childlike and overwhelming
enthusiasm that he brought to every one of his hugely ambitious projects, that
kept the art world from acknowledging him as one of the greatest artists of
this era. What he and Jeanne-Claude, his wife and collaborator, achieved was so
different from the work of anyone else, and on such a huge scale—seventy-five
hundred saffron-colored nylon “gates,” in Central Park; the Reichstag, in Berlin, and the
Pont Neuf, in Paris, transformed by their cloth wrappings into monumental and
sensuous sculptures—that it’s hard to believe it was also ephemeral. Each
spectacle drew huge crowds for two weeks and then vanished forever, without a
trace. Together, the couple brought us a long-running aesthetic experience that
was unlike anything else in contemporary art. Their deaths—Jeanne-Claude’s in 2009, Christo’s this past
Sunday—ought to shame historians into taking the full measure of it.
I
met them in 1964, the year they moved to New York from Paris, and I fell
instantly under the spell of their very different personalities. Christo, who
spoke almost no English, was mercurial, passionate, and implacable.
Jeanne-Claude was French and upper-class, self-confident, witty, and—the
essential factor—a brilliant manager. Their arguments were public and fierce,
and punctuated by endearments—“Non, non, non, cheri!” I
wrote about them first in 1972, when they were working on the “Valley Curtain”
in Rifle, Colorado. I went to the openings of “The Pont Neuf Wrapped” and
“Surrounded Islands,” and several other projects that I didn’t write about. The
one I loved best, and did write about, was their “Running Fence,” from 1976, an eighteen-foot-high
white nylon “ribbon of light,” as Christo described it, which stretched across
twenty-four and a half miles of rolling farmland in California’s Marin and
Sonoma Counties, and ended in the Pacific Ocean. The project cost the artists
three million dollars, every cent of which Jeanne-Claude raised herself: some
of the funds were from art dealers, but the major portion came from sales of
Christo’s drawings of the staggeringly beautiful fence itself.
Photograph by Wolfgang
Volz / laif / Redux
On
the night the illegal leap was completed, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and twenty
or thirty of the three hundred and sixty young, paid volunteers they had hired,
were working by moonlight to install the last few panels, which went into the
ocean. The workers had been on the job since five that morning, and they were
laughing and shouting to each other. Christo moved back and forth, checking
hooks, and occasionally running his hand along the white fabric. “Look at
Christo flirting with his fence,” Jeanne-Claude said. A long-haired kid in torn
jeans said, joyously, “It’s just so flip and outrageous. I can’t wait to see
the rest of it.” Nobody enjoyed the fence more than Christo. Riding beside it
one day in the passenger seat of a pickup truck driven by Ted Dougherty, the
contractor on the project, he called out excitedly, “Look there, Ted. See how
it describes the wind.”