The Triumphal Arch in Paris will be looking very different between September 18 and October 3: “L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped”, the posthumously realized work of visionary contemporary art duo Christo (1935-2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009), will see the landmark monument in the French capital covered in recyclable silver-blue fabric.
“This is the achievement of a 60-year-old dream, a crazy dream come true,” French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday, during his visit to the location.
The public art project has been in different stages of development ever since 1961, when Christo and Jeanne-Claude first sketched out the wrapping of the arch.
Christo was born Hristo Yavashev in 1935 in Gabrovo, Bulgaria. Opposed to the postwar Communist regime, which nationalised his father’s textile business, the family moved to Plovdiv in the early 1950s.
Frustrated by the limited possibilities for experimental art amid the rise of social realism at Sofia’s National Academy of Arts, in 1956 Yavashev migrated illegally to Prague and then to Vienna.
“I am an artist and I want to do art that’s impossible to create in Bulgaria”, he wrote to his brother Anani in the same year. He later settled in Paris in 1958, where he found his partner, wife and creative collaborator, Frenchwoman Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon.
Over the next decades, Christo and Jeanne-Claude would be known for their grand-scale, environmental, temporary and always privately sponsored works, often preceded by years of planning and negotiations, eventually drawing millions of visitors to their installations.
These include works such as Valley Curtain in Australia in 1972, The Umbrellas in the US and Japan (1984-1991), The Pont Neuf Wrapped (1985) in France, Wrapped Reichstag (1995) in Germany, and The Gates (2005) in the US.
The duo lived in New York from 1964.
After Jeanne-Claude passed away in 2009, Christo continued their ideas for the next decade, keeping both their names attached to every project. His last projects were The Floating Piers in Italy (2016) and the London Mastaba (2018), both decades in the making.
He died in 2020, while still working on the wrapping of the Triumphal arch, with Christo’s wishes for the project to be finished by his collaborators, which include his nephew, Vladimir Yavashev.
The creation of the current project can be watched live on YouTube. The event coincided with various retrospective exhibitions in France and Bulgaria, with Sofia City Art Gallery hosting an exhibition of photographer Wolfgang Voltz working with the duo since their early days and currently documenting the wrapping of the Triumphal arch.
The project’s history is also covered in a new book of photography and drawings by publishing house Taschen.
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