Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s large-scale installations modified existing landscapes and public spaces.
Imposing Installations
Wrapped Coast, One Million Square Feet (1969) covered the coast of Little Bay in Sydney with a million square feet of erosion-control fabric. The materials were later recycled and the landscape returned to its prior condition.
Later installations, like The Umbrellas, Japan-USA (1991), were met with criticism. The $26 million project consisting of 3100 umbrellas led to two deaths: a passerby assaulted by a windswept umbrella and a worker involved in the deinstallation of the work.
Nouveau Réalisme
Christo’s early works were inspired by the Nouveau Réalisme movement, which made use of everyday objects and materials adapted into multimedia installations. The artist’s experimentation with bicycles, beer cans, and road signs drew from artists like Jean Tinguely and Yves Klein, whose work made use of sculptural and kinetic elements to blur the line between artwork and environment.
Later works like The Gates (2005), an installation of 7503 bright orange gateways spread across Central Park in New York, involved multiple stakeholders and generated great public engagement. The project took 26 years, $21 million, and the cooperation of the New York Mayor and the Central Park Conservancy to complete, generating a significant profit.
Wrapped Legacy
When they first arrived in New York, Christo and Jeanne-Claude contemplated the idea of wrapping two skyscrapers together. The idea of wrapping public buildings originated in Paris in 1961, when Christo made a photo collage depicting a wrapped building in a Parisian square.
