Christo & Jeanne-Claude: Transforming the Familiar

Christo & Jeanne-Claude1935– AND 1935–2009 | AMERICANSCULPTURE; ENVIRONMENTAL ART

Christo and Jeanne-Claude—a husband and wife partnership based in New York—traveled the world to create highly original, memorable projects. They wrapped objects. They started in 1958 with small items and moved on to very large ones in 1961, including wrapping the Pont Neuf in Paris and the Reichstag in Berlin, in fabric and ropes, which both suggest and conceal the thing wrapped. They also created landscape projects, such as a 24-mile (40-km)-long curtain (literally) running across open countryside. The big projects were deliberately temporary, so one only has a limited opportunity of seeing them.

Their underlying purpose wasn’t social but aesthetic—the transformation of the well-known into the unfamiliar or disquieting, while at the same time touching and involving everyone in the creative process.

Wrapped Trees

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 1997–98, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park, Basel, Switzerland. For this installation, 178 trees were wrapped in 592,000 sq ft (55,000 sq m) of woven polyester fabric and ropes.

KEY WORKS:Wrapped Coast, 1968–69 (New South Wales, Australia: Little Bay);Surrounded Islands, 1983 (Florida: Biscayne Bay)