Jeanne-Claude; Times UK obit
Hyfler/Rosner
November 21, 2009
Jeanne-Claude: artist
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6925869.ece
Jeanne-Claude met Christo in Paris after he had fled, via
Austria, from the intolerable restrictions of the communist
bloc in Bulgaria. The year was 1958. From then on these two
brave, determined and resourceful artists worked together on
an astonishing variety of projects.
They refused to be restricted by any conventional limits,
tackling sites as monumental as the Reichstag in Berlin, an
expanse of Australian coastline, a Colorado valley and
Central Park in New York.
The wonder is that they managed to fulfil so many of these
vast and unlikely dreams. But Christo and Jeanne-Claude were
nothing if not stubborn and single-minded. Their visionary
impulses became allied to a very worldly understanding of
how best to achieve their seemingly unattainable goals.
Both born on the same day in June 1935, they could hardly
have come from more diverse backgrounds. Christo had grown
up in Bulgaria, the son of an industrialist father.
Jeanne-Claude, by extreme contrast, was born in Casablanca.
Her full name was Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, and she
came from a French military family - a background that may
well have helped her to develop the discipline and toughness
required to plan and then supervise the execution of her
ventures with Christo.
Educated in France and Switzerland, she gained her
baccalaureate in Latin and philosophy at the University of
Tunis in 1952. Christo, by contrast, studied at the Fine
Arts Academy in Sofia and then, albeit briefly, at the
Vienna Fine Arts Academy. So his training had been far more
focused on visual art, but Jeanne-Claude's broader education
might have made it easier for her to break free from
traditional art and embrace the challenge of the unknown.
Almost at once they started making packages and wrapped
objects, transforming everything they touched into bizarre,
dreamlike and mysterious images that defied any attempt to
pin them down to a single meaning.
After the birth in 1960 of their son Cyril, who is now a
poet, they embarked on their first big project outside the
boundaries of the art gallery. Using tarpaulin and rope,
they intended to stack oil barrels along with dockside
packages at Cologne harbour.
Like all their subsequent interventions in urban and rural
spaces, it provoked controversy. The following year, in
1962, they blocked the rue Visconti in Paris with an Iron
Curtain-Wall of oil barrels. Intended as a comment on the
tragic divisions caused by the Berlin Wall, it completely
overshadowed the exhibition they held in a Paris gallery at
the same time.
Even so, the assistance of dealers would prove crucial to
Christo and Jeanne-Claude. After moving to New York in 1964
and becoming American citizens, they regularly staged
gallery exhibitions to highlight and subsidise the ventures
planned for sites in the world far beyond the limits of
galleries and museums. Selling the sketches, collages and
scale models for these wildly ambitious schemes provided the
money to execute them. Their horizons were boundless, and
they never succeeded in realising all their ideas. But as
early as 1969 they did manage to wrap one million square
feet of coastline at Little Bay in Sydney. An astounding 36
miles of rope were used for this extraordinary venture,
which lasted for two months.
The international attention aroused by Wrapped Coast, Little
Bay undoubtedly helped Christo and Jeanne-Claude with their
other projects. A year later, using a generous expanse of
polyethylene, they wrapped the grandiose Monument to
Vittorio Emanuele in the Piazza del Duomo, Milan.
Emboldened by that success, they then obtained permission to
install Valley Curtain in Grand Hogback, Rifle, Colorado.
The work was executed in 1972, and the image of this immense
curtain resounded across the world. It looked poetic,
exemplifying the modern artist's determination to break down
all traditional barriers in their pursuit of expressive
freedom. But it was underpinned by the sheer hard work of
installing such a piece in the American landscape with the
aid of nylon fabric, steel cables and 800 tonnes of
concrete.
Although Jeanne-Claude played a crucial part in realising
the Valley Curtain, Christo was at this stage the only name
mentioned as the artist responsible. But they were, in
truth, a seasoned double act. And in 1976 they implemented
an astonishing feat: the Running Fence, stretching over
Sonoma and Marin counties in California. Lasting two weeks,
it was 24.5 miles long and crossed 14 roads.
The material statistics were also staggering: 2 million
square feet of woven nylon fabric, 90 miles of steel cables
and 2,050 steel poles. Yet somehow, this vast undertaking
became a resonant reality.
By this time Christo and Jeanne-Claude had established a
long-term relationship with the London dealers Annely and
David Juda. They first met during Documenta 4 at Kassel in
1968, and their first exhibition at Annely Juda Fine Art was
held three years later. They called it Projects Not
Realised, a tantalising title often used to underscore the
fact that Christo and Jeanne-Claude were forever working
towards the fulfilment of apparently impossible dreams.
By far the most celebrated, and the most difficult to
implement, was the Wrapped Reichstag. After 24 long and
arduous years of intense lobbying, Christo and Jeanne-Claude
finally succeeded in wrapping this iconic Berlin building on
June 24, 1995.
It was a momentous occasion, nail-biting for everyone
concerned. And a full-length documentary film called Wrapped
Reichstag testifies to the exhausting amount of skilled,
carefully plotted work involved in realising this ambition.
Directed by Wolfram and J�rg-Daniel Hissen, the film starts
by showing the bespectacled Christo and the flame-haired
Jeanne-Claude patiently obtaining permissions from German
officials of many different kinds. The whole tortuous
process took so long that the artists felt elated when the
German parliament voted to go ahead.
No less than 100,000 square metres of thick woven
polypropylene fabric with an aluminium surface were
eventually thrown over the Reichstag and secured with 15,600
metres of blue rope.
Since the artists never accepted sponsorship of any kind,
the entire work was financed by them. And it turned into a
triumph. By concealing the old building, Wrapped Reichstag
became a revelation. A new reality was exposed in the very
heart of Berlin, symbolising the city's liberation from
oppressive postwar divisions. What was then the largest
peaceful gathering in German history crowded around it,
proving just how popular this shimmering apparition became
over its two-week duration.
By this time, Jeanne-Claude's name had been added to Christo's
on all their projects. And they continued with undiminished
resolve, most spectacularly when 23 miles of Central Park's
footpaths in New York were festooned with thousands of
saffron drapes hung from special frames.
Other equally audacious projects included wrapping the Pont
Neuf in Paris, surrounding islands off the coast of Florida
with fabric, installing giant umbrellas in California and
Japan.
After Jeanne-Claude's death in New York Christo declared in
a statement that he was "committed to honour the promise
they had made to each other many years ago: that the art of
Christo and Jeanne-Claude would continue". She would
undoubtedly have applauded his words, and urged him to
complete their current installation, Over the River, a
typically epic project for the Arkansas River in the State
of Colorado.
Jeanne-Claude, artist, was born on June 13, 1935. She died
from complications of a brain aneurysm on November 18, 2009,
aged 74