Christo & Jeanne-Claude

About This Piece

Christo arrived in Paris in March 1958, after periods in Vienna and Geneva. It is not surprising that despite his lack of language skills, he quickly settled down in the city. After all, Paris was still at the centre of the international art scene at that time, even though New York was increasingly outstripping it. In Paris (and on several trips to Germany) Christo also met the protagonists of the European and American avantgarde, including Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and Nam June Paik. Under the influence of a progressive art scene that was busily exploding all conventions, Christo began to "appropriate" everyday objects, to deprive them of their function, and, by putting them under wraps, to preserve them permanently for posterity. Even if the first works had been created as random artistic experiments, Christo soon realized that this was the beginning of an artistic career in which the transformation of everyday objects and places would become the central theme. His approach was direct, immediate, radical.

While he covered the first "wrapped" objects—mostly empty paint cans and glass bottles—with a layer of glue, sand and gloss paint to create an encrusted, haptic surface, he soon began to let the material "breathe," so that the work was subject to constant change. It was only later that Christo started to experiment with the contents of his wrappings as well, using transparent polyethylene so that one can at least guess at the content of his tied-up objects. Christo's passion was primarily directed towards the objects as physical things and not as bearers of meaning. He was concerned above all with the texture, the form, and not so much with the content. Wherever he could, he rummaged around to find new objects. He confiscated his landlord's chair, Jeanne-Claude's shoes, their son's stroller. In the following years he was to wrap objects with the obsession of a fetishist: magazines, bicycles, and telephones.

These early objects all arose in direct involvement with the real, physical object, spontaneously, without the need for any particular planning or preparation. That was soon to change. Christo was no longer satisfied with small-scale objects. His works became bigger, more complex and extended further and further into the surrounding space. He took a decisive step towards the later large-scale projects conceptually in the early 1960s, but especially after he and Jeanne-Claude moved to New York in 1964. The production of his works became so complex that he began to prepare them with sketches and drawings, which enabled him to visualize his ideas in advance. Each drawing was an independent work of art in its own right, but at the same time the drawings did not become pure ends in themselves. They fulfilled a specific function within the work process. In this sense, it is doubtless wrong to speak of "sketches" in relation to Christo's works. Rather, these were technical drawings: on a two-dimensional path, so to speak, the desired end-product took on its "definitive" form, a template from which the work could then be realized as a craft object.