Christo passed away today, on May 31, 2020, at his home in New York City. Christo and Jeanne-Claude have always made clear that their artworks in progress be continued after their deaths. L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped (Project for Paris) is still on track for Sept. 18–Oct. 3, 2021. pic.twitter.com/xHPURw60w2— Christo and Jeanne-Claude (@ChristoandJC) May 31, 2020
From the NYT obituary:
His grand projects, often decades in the making and all of them temporary, required the cooperation of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of landowners, government officials, judges, environmental groups, local residents, engineers and workers, many of whom had little interest in art and a deep reluctance to see their lives and their surroundings disrupted by an eccentric visionary speaking in only semi-comprehensible English.Click on my "Christo" tag. I've written about him many times. At first, he annoyed me. Based on news articles about wrapping large buildings, I thought of him as arrogant. But watching Albert Maysles's series of 5 documentary films about him — showing his personal interactions with bureaucrats and citizens — completely changed my view.
Again and again, Christo prevailed, through persistence, charm and a childlike belief that eventually everyone would see things the way he did.
At his side, throughout, was his wife, Jeanne-Claude, who, like her husband, used only her first name. In the mid-1990s she began sharing equal billing with him on all their projects, formalizing what the couple insisted had been their practice all along. She died in 2009.
As I said back in 2005, when he did his "Gates" project in Central Park:
Roger Kimball reprints a Spectator piece from mid-January. He's quite negative:
Christo and his wife are geniuses at self-promotion. They have gulled municipalities around the world into letting them stage their pranks, and the result is celebrity and riches.I must admit that's what I thought of Christo for decades, as I read about his projects in various news reports. But I completely changed my mind about him when I watched the Maysles Brothers documentaries ("5 Films About Christo and Jeanne-Claude"...). I was won over and came to believe that Christo is an art saint.
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24 comments:
Interesting idea for art but it had been superseded by Photoshop and CGI. There was not any installation he did that couldn't have be done better with today's 3d visualization techniques.
He sounds like the anti-Karen.
For a long time I thought Christo was an attention whore and kind of a dope, but I had the privilege to see his Umbrellas installation in Tejon Pass in 1991. My experience was enhanced by the fact that it was a complete surprise to me. I was just on a road trip, and suddenly here were acres and acres of giant umbrellas. It was both real and surreal. Ever since, I've been a fan. RIP Christo.
I met Christo in the early 1980s when I was about 13. I grew up in South Bend, across town from Notre Dame, where my dad's best friend directed the art museum. There was some sort of exhibit of Christo's work, including photographs of his major works. I went to the opening. I was standing there with my dad and his friend the Director when Christo entered the room. The air dropped five degrees as he entered; the man had his own atmosphere. He walked right up to us, where my dad's friend immediately introduced my dad and me. Christo barely looked at me but I extended my hand and he took it. It was the dampest, most flaccid handshake of my life.
Look for a spectacular temporary gravestone.
The Gates changed my initial impressions about him. But I'll look forward to watching the Maysles Brothers docs on him.
I was won over and came to believe that Christo is an art saint.
@Althouse, you were right the first time.
I heard this news and came here expecting to see a reference to it.
That's a wrap!
Based on that photo he should have used the Surge Capacitor to go Back to the Future so he could cheat death. Wonder if it was the Libyan terrorists who got him.
Kimball is always attacking people who just died - Mailer, Sontag, etc. Not cool, but it's what one expects from a bow-tie wearer.
It's a familiar pattern with Christo. First people think he's crazy. Then they think he's brilliant, or very talented, or at least crazy enough to succeed at what he does -- and as with Sontag, Mailer, and maybe even Kimball, you miss them a little when they're gone.
Seeing the Maysles' "Running Fence" when I was in high school changed my life. It really made me rethink what Art (and therefore Life) might consist of. I'm glad I got to see one of their works in person (The Gates).
With all that is going right now, my question is, will we see his like again?
Replying to AA and to Gk1 in the first comment. I've struggled for decades with the question of the relative importance of "technique" and "ideas" in art. We have sculptures that are a block of slate -- all "idea" and zero technique. I think Christo's work is probably useful in moving forward on this question. Gk1 asks if his work can't be replicated or improved on by computer techniques. I think we've had similar arguments about photography -- why work to get a realistic painting of a scene when one can photograph it. For photography, I think artists have more or less proven that it's not true that "everyone can do it". But everyone can pee in a bottle, or paint a canvas white (or black), or put a label on a piece of rock. So is Christo close to this end of the "no technique all idea" spectrum?
I love the clip in one of those movies where he explains to some US govt official how the Dutch invented commodified art, I think it was van Eyck. They needed something more like their gold and commodities that could be transported and traded. Besides being an interesting take on the origins of "commercial art," it is perhaps the purest expression of the broader European stereotype of the Dutch I've ever encountered. I've heard similar things from all manner of European, even Brits, but the basic take is the Dutch are not a culture or a country, but basically a company and entirely dedicated to commerce in all respects. Christo's take on art perfectly contextualizes the great Dutch contribution to Renaissance art in this characterization of their culture of commerce. Brilliant.
S. Cooper said: It is nice that you "completely changed your view."
On a personal basis, I have gotten, in my life, somewhere between (I am wildly guessing here) five hundred and five thousand heart-felt compliments from human beings (add in dogs, cats, and smaller animals and plants and I am up to half a million or so - as are many of us without knowing it ....)---the only compliments I effortlessly remember in those rare moments when I feel dejected are from people who literally told me
"at first I thought you were a loser but then I changed my mind", or something like that.
Since this is an art post, here are three or four artists who I started out thinking of as phony but later realized were the real deal ....
Berthe Morisot (well I never thought of her as phony but I assumed she was famous because she was the only female artist associated with the vintage year impressionists - but actually she was a better painter than any of them ---- her portraits are better than theirs, which is another way of saying she was a better painter).
Hans Hoffman (an "abstract expressionist", which usually means some guy with connections in the art world who is only good at one small aspect of painting) .... you could not pay me to put most abstract expressionist paintings on my wall, including the painters whose works sell in the centimillion range, but there are a few paintings by this guy in my local museum and whatever it is he does, he does it really really well.
Curly from the Three Stooges. I mean I always liked him, even when I was a kid, but I never realized he was as good an artist as he was until much later. I am not even sure that he isn't much better even than WC Fields, the way Falstaff is better than similar Shakespearean characters, which he is, at least when considered as a creation of a human artist.
Marilyn Monroe. I always found her super-attractive, but just a "Hollywood star," but every time I look at her in the movies now, I see the artist ---- pay attention to the way she wears her clothes or the way she looks at people (well, to keep this real, the way she looks at other actors while being filmed). The thought of this great artist being mistreated by a filthy Kennedy is nearly unbearable.
To be more fair to Christo's comment: his point was the the Dutch invented "the painting" as a unit of art that could be bought and sold, transported and restored and reframed and measured and marketed. Before Van Eyck invented the painting as the unit of art, Christo said, art was something broader, harder to define, I suppose frescoes on walls and statuary in situ, but that's not something you can create a market around. I have no idea if Van Eyck is the guy who figured this out, or what precise role the Dutch played in creating the art market, but something like that obviously did happen, and it would make a lot of sense if the Dutch played such a pivotal part. Saint of Art is a beautiful and apt epitaph for a guy who, in a brief exchange with a fucking government official, made such a brilliant observation about art as a whole (and apparently persuaded the guy to sign and stamp the right documents and ensure they were all filed correctly).
R.I.P. Christo. Thanks for the fabulous art.
If anything, I'm more negative than Roger Kimball on Christo's "art".
Lost my interest in him when his artwork killed a couple of people.
@Lazarus
Kimball wrote that piece on Christo a long time ago, not in response to his death.
Maybe I'll check out the documentaries because I agree with the former you that his projects are stunts, not art.
The best thing that can be said about Christo is that he raises the question "What is Art and what isn't?".
When I was a kid, Christo made the Running Fence, which ran thru a field up a hill behind our house. During the lengthy preparations, I parroted most of the adults, who talked about how stupid and wasteful it was, but when he completed the Running Fence, it was spectacular, awe inspiring. His other projects were also imaginatively beautiful, and the documentary was wonderful.
RiP
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