Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Paris!
The Centre Pompidou hosts a major exhibition retracing artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s years in Paris together from 1958 to 1964. After the Pont-Neuf, another Parisian landmark will soon be temporary wrapped this year: the Arc de Triomphe.*
The seven years Christo lived in Paris were essential to the development of his work as an artist. Christo broke free from the boundaries of the painting, as he began wrapping everyday objects and creating temporary artworks in public spaces. He also began conceiving works of art in monumental dimension, envisioning numerous temporary projects for the city.
The first section of the exhibition presents around 80 works from 1958, the year Christo and Jeanne-Claude met, until 1964, when they moved to New York. The second section, The Pont-Neuf Wrapped Documentation Exhibition, retraces the period leading up to the realisation of The Pont-Neuf Wrapped, Paris, 1975-1985 with a collection of around 300 items, including original drawings and collages, a scale model, photographs, documents, engineering studies and original components of the realised project.
The exhibition also includes the screening of the film Christo in Paris (1990) by the Maysles brothers, which documents the ten years Christo and Jeanne-Claude devoted to The Pont-Neuf Wrapped..
The Parisian years, 1958-1964
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude Marie Denat were both born on June 13, 1935, respectively in Gabrovo (Bulgaria) and Casablanca (Morocco).
Christo fled communist Bulgaria to Prague in 1956 before reaching Vienna and Geneva. He ultimately settled in Paris in March 1958, where he met Jeanne-Claude. Christo established his own artistic language during his years in Paris.
Working with texture, surface, objects, scale and appropriation of space, Christo created his early works and later he and Jeanne-Claude began developing the monumental temporary projects they became best known for.
In Paris, he earned his living as a classical portraitist for high society families. He began creating what he called his Inventory — a collection of small cans, bottles, crates and later barrels, wrapped in fabric, stiffened with lacquer and tied with twine.
What was most attractive to Christo was surface. The results of his continuous and restless experimentations include the Surfaces d’Empaquetage [Packing Surfaces], made of folded and wrinkled lacquered cloth or paper, then washed to highlight the reliefs, and the Cratères [Craters].
This little-known series, presented here at the Centre Pompidou for the first time, is characterised by an extremely commanding physical presence: sand and dust mixed with paint and glue create an earthy-looking bas-relief that expands both inside and outside the surface of the work. Like a lunar landscape, the Craters can be seen as Christo’s answer to Jean Dubuffet’s very textural works of the 1950’s. Most of Christo’s iconic Empaquetages [Packages] were made between 1958 and the early 1960s by wrapping everyday objects.
Christo’s first works of art in public spaces were temporary structures made of piled or stacked barrels in his studio in Gentilly.
“I found the cylindrical oil barrels already looked like sculptures themselves” says Christo. “The spilled oil, the bleached out colour, the rust, the bumps – I found them very enchanting, very beautiful, because they were ‘real’.”
As a reaction to the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Christo and Jeanne-Claude envisioned a work that would barricade one of the narrowest street in Paris with a wall of 89 barrels.
Raised on the night of June 27, 1962, Mur provisoire de tonneaux métalliques – Le Rideau de fer, rue Visconti, Paris, 1961-1962 [Temporary Wall of Oil Barrels – The Iron Curtain, rue Visconti, Paris, 1961-62] was the second temporary public project that Christo and Jeanne-Claude built together.
In 1961, Christo and Jeanne-Claude also made their first proposal to wrap a public building (concert hall, conference hall, prison, parliament...). At that time Christo, who was living near the Arc de Triomphe, made several studies of a project there, including the photomontage Édifice public empaqueté (Projet pour l’Arc de Triomphe, Paris) [Wrapped Public Building].
The Pont-Neuf Wrapped, Paris, 1975-1985
The second section of the show is dedicated to the story of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s major urban project for Paris, with a collection 337 items, including 36 original drawings and collages, one large scale model, original archival documents, engineering components and about two hundred photographs by Wolfgang Volz.
As early as 1975, Christo and Jeanne-Claude developed the idea of wrapping the Pont-Neuf using golden sandstone polyamide to cover the sides, the 12 arches, parapets, borders and pavements (visitors would walk on the fabric), the 44 lamp-posts, the vertical sides of the central island, and the tip of the Île de la Cité and the Esplanade du Vert-Galant.
“For more than 400 years the Pont-Neuf has been the subject of hundreds of works of art”, he says. “When it was wrapped, for two weeks, it became a work of art itself.” Following Jacques Callot, Turner, Renoir, Brassaï, Pissarro, Picasso and Marquet, Christo and Jeanne-Claude added a new chapter to the history of the Parisian bridge. The temporary work of art was deeply connected to the urban fabric and real life of the city. It emphasised the architectural structure of the bridge, and provided a new approach to its dimension, its relationship to the surroundings, its function, and the way we interact with it.
Like all of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s temporary works, The Pont-Neuf Wrapped, Paris, 1975-1985, was on view for a very short time (from September 22 to October 6, 1985), and required substantial technical and human resources, following ten years of negotiations with both local politicians and residents. Christo and Jeanne- Claude’s large-scale temporary projects are funded exclusively through the sale of Christo’s original preparatory studies, drawings and collages, scale models, and works from the 1950s and 1960s. The artists have never received any public funding or private sponsorship.
Christo & Jeanne-Claude at the Paris City Hall. The artists, with Johannes Schaub, are received by Jacques Chirac (Mayor) and Françoise de Panafieu (Deputy Mayor), at the City Hall on Feb. 21, 1982. During this meeting, filmed by the Maysles brothers, Jacques Chirac, in favour of the project, specifies that he will not formally give his permission until after the next elections, scheduled a year later. © Christo 1983 - Photo © Wolfgang Volz
“All our temporary projects are very nomadic, in transition and always moving”, explains Christo. “They are once-in-a-lifetime and only remain in our memories. This quality is an essential part of our work. It’s very human: nothing lasts forever, this is the beauty of being alive.”
The exhibition runs from July 1st until October 19th, 2020 at the Gallery 2, Level 6, Centre Pompidou.
The Arc de Triomphe Wrapped (NEW Dates: Sept. 18 - Oct. 3, 2021)
Christo, in close collaboration with the Centre des Monuments Nationaux and the Centre Pompidou, will create a temporary artwork in Paris entitled The Arc de Triomphe Wrapped (Project for Paris, Place de l’Étoile-Charles de Gaulle).
This work of art will be on view for 16 days from Saturday, September 18 to Sunday, October 3, 2021.
The Arc de Triomphe will be wrapped in 25,000 square meters of recyclable polypropylene fabric in silvery blue, and 7,000 meters of red rope.
hero picture: The Pont-Neuf wrapped (project for Paris), 1985. Pencil, pastel, charcoal, wax crayon, ink prints and glue on cardboard in a plexiglas vitrine frame. Collection of the artist. Photo Philippe Migeat
*Note: This article was initially published on March 7th, 2020 with the original dates for the exhibition at the Pompidou Centre followed by the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe. Since the Coronavirus crisis, the wrapping has been postponed until September 18th until October 3rd, 2021. The exhibition at the Pompidou centre will finally open on July 1st until October 19th, 2020. On June 1st, we learnt that sadly Christo passed away at the age of 84. He requested that have the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe completed next year.