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Christo was incomparable, and so was Jeanne-Claude. But they were one, born on the same day, in the same year. Christo died last Sunday, 13 days before his 85th birthday—13 days before what would have been their 85th birthdays, if Jeanne-Claude hadn’t died 11 years ago.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude were dreamers. They thought big, using islands and bridges and mountains and monumental architecture as their canvases. They were uncompromising. I think of them as earth artists, with their vast environmental projects, and also precursors of performance art, using huge audiences to complete their pictures. They took conceptual art to new levels, stretching the boundaries of what art can be. Their projects, Valley Curtain in Pasadena, Surrounded Islands in Key Biscayne, Wrapped Reichstag in Berlin, The Pont Neuf Wrapped in Paris, and The Gates in Central Park, never failed to astonish and enchant. The spectacles were temporary, there usually for two weeks and then gone, but the effect was permanent. You could never forget the experience of seeing it. Their projects were also extremely popular, drawing mammoth crowds, something frowned on by the high-art police, but controversy, along with everything else, became part of the art too. They were making gesamtkunstwerks. It was grand opera.
One of the many fringe benefits of my marriage to Calvin Tomkins 32 years ago was his close friendship with Christo and Jeanne-Claude. In 1964, the year they moved to New York City from Paris, they invited him and a few other art-world movers and shakers they hadn’t met to dinner at their house on Howard Street—the house Christo occupied until his death. In those days, Jeanne-Claude did the cooking, and it was always the same menu: white Bond bread and supermarket steak. Jeanne-Claude had stopped cooking long before our marriage in 1988, so when we had dinner it was never at home. But that didn’t mean you weren’t expected to climb the 40 or more steep steps of the Howard Street townhouse to look at Christo’s drawings for their latest project. This before-dinner enlightenment continued while descending the stairs and walking two blocks to what had essentially become their dining room—the Culinary Institute of America—for a five-star feast. The conversation at dinner was always about the current project, occasionally punctuated by one of Jeanne-Claude’s off-color jokes (she really knew how to tell them). At least twice during the meal, she would get up from the table and go outside for a smoke, drawing all eyes with her flaming red hair and flowing Issey Miyake clothes. (They both wore Issey Miyake exclusively.) Christo would jump up, escort her to the door, return to the table, and jump up again when she returned. His manners were impeccable. She was, after all, the stepdaughter of a French general.
They never stopped working. When they weren’t traveling for a project, Christo spent the day standing at his drawing table on the top floor at Howard Street—it could be 17 hours straight without stopping for lunch. The studio was covered with nearly six decades of dust—a cleaning person was never allowed in his drawing space. They never traveled on the same plane. This way, if the plane crashed, the other one would be able to complete whatever project they were working on. Art before life.
Once a year, they went to the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, for a week of tests and checkups. They both believed in garlic. She took it by pill. He ate whole cloves raw, popping them like candy. For decades, Alex, their Russian masseur, came to Howard Street twice a week to give them shiatsu.
They never took a penny of funding from corporations, government grants—from anyone. Christo’s drawings paid the bills for every project, all of which cost in the multimillions. The Harvard Business School did a case study in 2006 (Case 806-014, “The Art of the Entrepreneur”) on them and their impressive financial operation.
It was snowing, a couple of hours before The Gates opened to the public on February 12, 2005, when our phone rang. Christo and Jeanne-Claude were calling to say they were outside our apartment building and wanted to show us something. They were in a very stylish black Maybach this time. (They always had a black limousine—later a giant black SUV—and a driver on call.) Christo said the curtain for the last Gate (number 7,503) had just been unfurled. Jeanne-Claude directed the driver to take the 110th Street gate into Central Park. What followed was their personal tour, driving through and periodically getting out to walk their favorite pathways, previewing The Gates. “What a gift to all of us,” I said. Jeanne-Claude said, “We do it for ourselves, because we want to see it.” They were both totally absorbed, seeing the whole of it for the first time, and under its mantle of fresh snow. Neither of them will get to see L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, their latest project, which was scheduled to open this coming September, but because of the coronavirus, will open a year later—for 16 days, from Saturday, September 18, through Sunday, October 3.
None of us thought Christo would survive Jeanne-Claude’s death in 2009. Somehow, he did, and miraculously brought The Floating Piers to Lake Iseo, Italy, in 2016. When he told us about the idea a couple of years before, an idea he and Jeanne-Claude had conceived in 1970 with a different location in mind, the old excitement was in his voice—the same rapid-fire, Bulgarian-accented English. Christo was back. The thrill of seeing another one of their visions come to life had eased some of the burdens of grief. The landscape, he said, was the one Leonardo had used in the background of the Mona Lisa.
Since 1977, Christo and Jeanne-Claude had dreamed of The Mastaba, the largest sculpture in the world, “the size of three New York City blocks,” he said, when he talked about it. Made from 410,000 multicolored empty oil barrels, it would have been the only one of their projects that broke their rule of ephemerality. This was their pyramid, meant to be eternal. They always had two projects in the works at the same time, and when one got the go-ahead, they gave it their full attention. Christo and Jeanne-Claude were working on The Mastaba when she died.
Four years ago, we traveled to the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert, a two hour’s drive from Abu Dhabi. Christo was taking us to see the spot where he wanted to build The Mastaba. (His nephew Vladimir Yavachev was with us. Since Jeanne-Claude’s death, Vladimir, his brother’s son, has become a crucial part of the Christo inner circle. Jeanne-Claude’s nephew Jonathan runs the New York studio.) The driver of our oversized SUV (white this time) skillfully navigated up and down huge wave-like sand hills. It was a rough ride. The rolling and plunging motion made me nauseous. The vast desert nothingness is Christo’s blank canvas. We were staying at a hotel in the desert that looked like a mirage. Christo talked and talked and talked—about the project, the complexity of the negotiations, the idea that this will become a campus someday, that the red, yellow, and blue barrels will form a mosaic that speaks the language of Islamic architecture. It’s great to see how the best artists mine their own art—Christo’s early wrapped-oil barrel sculptures and his Iron Curtain of 89 rusty oil barrels that blocked the Rue Visconti in Paris in 1962.
From the desert we went with Christo to Lake Iseo in Italy to see his unfinished Floating Piers, which would open two months later. The three of us walked unsteadily on the floating polyethylene cubes that would soon be covered with shimmering yellow nylon, and Christo pointed to the mountain range that Leonardo had supposedly painted for Mona Lisa. It was a sparkling clear day, not a cloud in sight, and we were walking on water with Christo.
The day before Christo died, I was Skyping with the artist Maurizio Cattelan in Costa Rica, and Christo’s name came up. “Whatever he does, I always say, ‘Wow,’” Maurizio marveled. “How can he manage to produce stuff like this? In his case, you have to convince so many people. It’s almost a religion…Christo goes on the street and preaches. He has his own Bible.”