He wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin in silvery fabric, dressed several islands near Miami in flamingo-pink skirts, ran a 24-mile-long fence through Northern California and installed 7,500 goal-post-like gates in New York’s Central Park. His installations, which in some cases attracted millions of visitors, expanded the definition of contemporary art, reports The Washington Post.
Christo, 84, a Bulgarian-born environmental artist known for his monumental works, died May 31st at his home in New York City. His office announced the death in a statement but did not give a precise cause.
Bespectacled and nerdy in appearance, Christo was the Evel Knievel of artists, pulling off seemingly impossible feats, such as erecting thousands of giant umbrellas simultaneously in the United States and Japan and persuading hundreds of German lawmakers to let him wrap the Reichstag. Measured by the number of people who saw his work, he was probably the most successful artist of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
New Yorker art critic Calvin Tomkins marveled at Christo’s “grandiose, ephemeral, absurdly beautiful spectacles,” while noting that their very accessibility evoked “disdain and hostility . . . in certain quarters.” Among art-world insiders, Christo’s installations, which required armies of workers and millions of dollars to pull off, were sometimes viewed as a triumph of spectacle over art.
But his thousands of drawings and models — which he sold to finance his projects — were art by anybody’s definition. From 1987 to 2003, Tomkins reported, Christo had sold more than $66 million-worth of his work.
For most of his career, Christo collaborated with his wife, the former Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon; together, they completed 23 large public projects. They developed ideas jointly, after which Christo made drawings and scale models while Jeanne-Claude (she, too, was known by her first name) handled logistics. Though the body of work was initially attributed to Christo, in 1994 they retroactively applied the joint name “Christo and Jeanne-Claude” to all their large-scale pieces.