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"Luminous Art & Design :: Art & Artists"
Christo and Jeanne-Claude :: Biography and Books"
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Christo and Jeanne-Claude are known worldwide for their large-scale environmental art works and wrappings. Famous works of the couple are the ‘Wrapped Reichstag’, ‘Surrounded Islands’ and ‘Running Fence’.
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Christo Vladimiroff Javacheff, who is better known just as Christo, was born on 13 June 1935 in Bulgaria. He studied Art in Sophia and Vienna before he moved to Paris in 1958. Christo began his famous wrapping of objects soon after he arrived in Paris. He started with small things, like cans and bottles. His first piece (Jan. 1958) was an empty paint tin wrapped with canvas, tied and colored with glue and paint. Later on he wrapped cars and covered shop windows. He wrapped the items with paper, plastic or fabric.
In 1958, Christo met Jean-Claude who was born on the same day, and in the same year, as Christo. She would become his wife as well as his business and artistic partner and photographer. Since 1961 most of Christo’s displays have been collaborative efforts with his wife. They prefer to be mentioned together as artists.
In 1961, Christo covered oil drums with tarpaulins and strapped them together in the harbor area in Cologne. Later followed the first large project of the couple, empty oil drums blocking a road (the Rideau de Fer). This temporary monument was a statement against the Berlin Wall and made Christo known in Paris.
After covering oil drums, shop windows and live female models, environments followed (Wrapped Air and Wrapped Trees). In the end of the 1960’s, the couple started to wrap public buildings. A Swiss art museum, the Kunsthalle in Bern, gave the artists their first opportunity to fully package an entire building. The project took 2,430 square meters (27,000 square feet) of reinforced polyethylene, 3,050 meters (10,000 feet) of nylon rope, six days and the help of eleven construction workers. The building was unwrapped again after one week.
Larger and larger projects followed. To name a few completed projects: Valley Curtain in Colorado 1970-72, Surrounded Coast in 1983, Running Fence in California 1972-76, Wrapped Walk Ways in Missouri 1977-78, The Pont Neuf Wrapped in Paris, 1975-85, The Gates at Central Park, New York in 2005 and Reichstag in Berlin 1971-95.
The Wrapped Reichstag, the former seat of a democratic German parliament, represented 24 years of efforts in the lives of the artists. The artists, who met with hundreds of East and West German government officials, did not receive permission to wrap the historic structure until 1994 after Germany was reunited. After Christo’s temporary piece of art was taken off the building, the German government started to plan a remodeling of the building for the use of the newly-unified German parliament.
Furthermore, all works of art are entirely financed by the artists. To give an example; the project ‘Umbrellas’ had a final cost of US$26 million. Money is collected through the sale of preparatory studies, drawings, collages, scale models as well as early works and original lithographs and the couple does not accept sponsorship.
In general Christo's projects get larger and larger and more complicated. The planning stages become very complicated, especially in relationship to the amount of time that the object stays wrapped. However, original visitors to the work of art can feel the effect on the environments much longer after the physical trace has been removed. Christo and Jean-Claude alter the reality with their work of art.
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