1935-2020

He whom critics called the “wrapper artist,” whose full name was Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, was born on 13 June 1935, the same day as the woman who would be his wife and inseparable companion in artistic endeavors: Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon. Renouncing the life he was condemned to as the son of the Soviet intelligentsia, he fled to Paris, where he lived precariously and met Jeanne-Claude. Their beginnings as artists were linked to the poetics of the objet trouvé, much along the lines of their contemporaries Matta-Clark and Arman, but moving to the United States in 1964 led them to Land Art and changed their approach radically. The result was a corpus of projects of breathtaking grandeur in which buildings, urban spaces, and territories were used as instruments in a fusion of built and imagined reality. So it was that Christo and Jeanne-Claude together created some of the most celebrated works of art of the past decades, from the eleven islands in Biscayne Bay surrounded with pink fabric to the wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin, symbol of the optimism of reunified Germany.