Christo and Jeanne-Claude
In 1958, Christo Vladimirov Javacheff moved to Paris and met Jeanne-Claude, a Moroccan-born French woman who had studied philosophy at the University of Tunis. The young Bulgarian artist received a commission to paint a portrait of her mother and fell in love with the vibrant redhead, who serendipitously shared his birthday: the 13th of June, 1935. Fate conspired to unite this extraordinary pair of Geminis, who worked together until Jean-Claude’s death in 2009, transforming the experience of public art into something equal parts powerful and profound.
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“I have a real need to appropriate reality,” Christo reveals in the stunning new book Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Urban Projects (D.A.P./Verlag Kettler), the first volume to give a comprehensive account of their work inside cities around the globe.
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“The real is the real. The work is not a photograph, a film, or an image. It is the real thing,” Christo says, speaking with passion over the phone from the US. “This is because I have the enormous visceral pleasure of the real thing. I understand many people do not like to be in an uncomfortable place that is windy, hot, boring, because it is demanding of your effort, but if you have a physical pleasure to only do things like that (laughs), you understand. It is something.”
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“The Gates” (2005)