Christo Javacheff

Biography

The Reichstag stood wrapped in silver fabric for two weeks in June 1995, and those two weeks took twenty-four years of negotiation with six presidents of the Bundestag, the German parliament. Christo himself called the project in a sense autobiographical: he had grown up in Bulgaria, on the far side of the border that divided Europe.

He was born on 13 June 1935 in Gabrovo, the second of three sons. His father, Vladimir Javacheff, worked in textile manufacturing; his mother, Tzveta Dimitrova, who came from Thessaloniki, was secretary of the Academy of Arts in Sofia. Artists visited the house, and the boy began drawing early. From 1952 or 1953 (sources differ) he studied at the Sofia Academy of Fine Arts, but he found the teaching dull and built on nineteenth-century models, and he drew his inspiration from art books. At weekends students were sent out to paint propaganda, and he took part without enthusiasm.

In 1956 he travelled to Prague to visit relatives. After the events in Hungary, when people in Czechoslovakia feared fresh pressure, he crossed the Austrian border illegally, according to some accounts hidden in a railway car. In Vienna he studied briefly at the academy and applied for political asylum as a stateless person. He earned his living with commissioned portraits; children and women, he said later, were what he painted best. He visited Geneva, and the museums of Basel and Zurich overwhelmed him. In January 1958 he wrapped an object for the first time, a paint can. He called his collection of wrapped objects “Inventory”. In February 1958 Christo left for Paris.

In October 1958 he was commissioned to paint a portrait of Précilda de Guillebon, and so he met her daughter, Jeanne-Claude. They had been born on the same day, 13 June 1935, she in Casablanca. Their son Cyril was born in 1960. Their first joint exhibition took place in Cologne in 1961. In 1962, around the time of Christo’s first solo show in Paris, they blocked Rue Visconti with a wall of 240 barrels: “Iron Curtain”, a reply to the Berlin Wall.

In 1964 the couple moved to New York. Christo made “Store Fronts”, wooden facades imitating shop windows, and in the mid-1960s “Air Packages”, wrapped inflated weather balloons. In 1969, at the invitation of the museum director Jan van der Marck, they wrapped the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, which stayed open throughout. The same year, with the support of the collector John Kaldor and a hundred volunteers, they wrapped the shore at Little Bay near Sydney. At first they signed their work with a single name, “Christo”: it simplified business, and prejudice against women artists was a real obstacle. Later they retroactively credited the large projects to both of them.

Then came “Valley Curtain” in Colorado (1972), which stood for 28 hours before the wind destroyed the fabric; the documentary film about it by the brothers David and Albert Maysles was nominated for an Academy Award. “Running Fence” in California, 24.5 miles of white nylon, went through eighteen public hearings and three sessions in state court; it stood for two weeks in September 1976. In May 1983 eleven islands in Biscayne Bay, Miami, were surrounded with pink fabric, with 430 people at work. In September and October 1985 the Pont Neuf was wrapped for two weeks, and about three million people saw it.

In October 1991, 3,100 umbrellas, blue and yellow, opened simultaneously in Japan and California; the project cost 26 million dollars. Two weeks later in California a gust of wind tore one umbrella loose and a woman was killed. Christo decided to close the exhibition early. During the dismantling in Japan a worker was killed when a crane touched a high-voltage cable.

The road to “The Gates” in Central Park ran from 1979 to 2005. Permission came from the newly elected mayor, Michael Bloomberg. From 12 to 27 February 2005, 7,503 saffron-coloured gates, five metres high, stood along the paths.

Jeanne-Claude died on 18 November 2009. Christo went on working: in 2013 he filled the gasometer in Oberhausen with “Big Air Package”, and in 2016 he made “The Floating Piers” on Lake Iseo in Italy, where nearly one and a half million people walked on water. In 2018 “The London Mastaba”, made of 7,506 barrels, stood on the Serpentine in London. In January 2017 he cancelled “Over the River” in Colorado, citing weariness with the legal fight and the politics of the new administration.

The couple paid for all their projects themselves, without grants or sponsors, by selling drawings, collages and scale models. Christo had been a United States citizen since 1973. He died on 31 May 2020 at his home in New York. The wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris took place after his death, in September and October 2021.