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Christo and Jeanne-Claude shared a birthday: June 13, 1935. The couple were collaborators to such a degree that we know them by their first names, paired together like a multisyllabic stage name. Starting this month, the late artists are being recognized in two ways for what would be their 90th birthday: A meticulous retrospective is being mounted at the Museum Würth in Künzelsau, Germany and The Shed in New York will be the host of a multiplatform retrospective specifically looking at the duo’s landmark Central Park showcase, The Gates, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.
These two exhibitions are fuel enough to revisit the legacy and architectural leanings of the iconic artists. The Würth’s Wrapped, tied, stacked. Christo and Jeanne-Claude displays the extensive collection of works by the artists owned by longtime collaborator and friend Reinhold Würth. More than 120 pieces of process-oriented ephemera will be on display. While these aren’t the same vein as the monumental public works we know and love, it shows the thinking and meticulous planning the artists executed behind the scenes—often for decades before full realization—that takes on an architectural scale. Collages, photographs, sketches, scale models, and videos are just some of the media to expect at the show, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the creative gestation that architects definitely love.
Sylvia Weber, director of the Würth Collection and joint curator along with Kirsten Fiege, said that “Christo and Jeanne-Claude undoubtedly shifted the dimension of what had been conceivable as a work of art…. The second skin he put over the objects triggers our imagination.
Perhaps best-known for their “wrapping” of landmarks—the Pont Neuf (1985) and Arc de Triomphe (2021) to name just two—Christo’s oeuvre is unique for its architectural sensibility; for taking an existing piece and allowing the public to see it anew. As the New York Times wrote in Christo’s obituary, “he generated no small measure of happiness and awe.” That palpable joy is a thread running through each work, and undoubtably for those here in the U.S. familiar with the 2005 installation in Central Park, The Gates. Marking 20 years since the groundbreaking work, the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation is collaborating on a multiplatform exhibition titled Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates and Unrealized Projects for New York City. A collaboration between The Shed, Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Central Park Conservancy, and NYC Parks will include a gallery exhibition at The Shed as well as an AR app-based experience in Central Park where users can recreate gates as they traverse the park, and learn more about the work through the Bloomberg Connects app.
The “gates” in question were designed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude at an architectural scale, with an architectural purpose: 7,503 saffron-colored gates were created by securing poles to the park’s sidewalks and hanging saffron-colored fabric between them. The energetic color cut through the wintery mix that descends upon the park each February in New York, albeit for the shortest possible window of time: the installation was up for a mere 16 days.
“Even after 20 years, the unforgettable visual memory of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates is still in the minds of the many people who experienced it in person or viewed it from afar,” said Vladimir Yavachev, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s director of projects and Christo’s nephew. “Credited with revolutionizing New York City’s relationship with participatory and community-based art and igniting dialogue about the importance of public art globally, The Gates captured the imagination of millions and helped revive a city that had been transformed by the tragedy of 9/11 four years earlier.”
What stands out to this critic when reflecting on Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s oeuvre, however, isn’t only the work of wrapping or activating itself: it’s also the ethos and politics behind the decisions of where and what to wrap. Christo was born into Soviet Bulgaria and never let his anti-fascist views shake. He and his wife staunchly vetoed private funding of their works: “I came from a Communist country,” Christo told the New York Times. “I use my own money and my own work and my own plans because I like to be totally free.” This stance in an art and design world increasingly reliant on public-private partnerships, brand sponsorships—as well as censorship—reads like a breath of fresh air. Christo and Jeanne-Claude really walked the walk. A famous example of this ethos occurred in 2017, when the couple was readying to culminate a decades-long project to bridge the Arkansas River in the mountains of Colorado with signature a fabric canopy. Christo “walked away from the work at the 11th hour” after he realized the land was federally owned—making Donald Trump his “landlord.” The sunk cost of millions of his own dollars didn’t matter to him. His work reflected his beliefs, making this project incongruent.
“My uncle always told me that if you are accountable to anyone, you don’t have freedom,” said Yavachev. “Remember, in art school in communist Bulgaria, he was criticized by the authorities because the peasants in his painting did not look happy enough! That was too much for him.”
At every turn, even at the height of his practicing fame, Christo was embattled by bureaucratic processes hindering his large-scale dreams. Unlike a painter responsible for a single canvas or a musician recording a single song, Christo’s work hinged on high-visibility, public access, and government collaboration to achieve the scale he desired. Despite these hinderances, he never bowed to the expectations of the institution nor amended his ethics to complete a project. He was persistent, unrushed, and visionary.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s final work is set to be the Mastaba in the Liwa desert outside Abu Dhabi. The couple first visited the site in the 1970s, documented by a series of playful photographs, scale models, and countless drawings of the awe-inspiring mass and scale of the proposed work. Christo worked with Emirates officials directly to select the site and collaborated with ETH Zurich professors on feasibility studies to stack and secure a permanent artwork of hundreds of thousands of oil barrels. While this vision is yet to be realized, the optimism is clear on the Foundation’s website. If we live to see the day this posthumous work comes to life, surely the world could be a better place with a permanent monument to Christo and Jeanne-Claude—or maybe their ephemeral works are meant to live only in our memory.