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The map sent by Christo and Jeanne-Claude read, "Many people have difficulty finding us, so please bring this map!!!" Who would have thought that the artists, known for monumental, controversial works of gigantic proportions, whose projects cost them millions to build with preparatory drawings selling for hundreds of thousands, would live in a plain graffiti-covered brick block in New York's SoHo, next to a scruffy little park-turned-flea market with goods so cheap that the vendors don't even bother to take them home at night?
The two moved to the building in 1964 because it was all they could afford. In '60s SoHo, there were no galleries, no design shops, no corner coffee bars. Loft living then was not trendy but illegal. Minimalist decor was more a sign of poverty than chic. But the move wasn't unusual for Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who were as committed then as they are now to a mainstream-be-damned attitude. As Jeanne-Claude says, "We want to do what we want, when we want, how we want."
It wasn't always that way. As an art student in his native Bulgaria, Christo Javacheff had to learn not only painting and sculpture but also ideology and propaganda art. In 1956, he moved to what was then called Czechoslovakia — still communist but freer — and escaped to Austria on a freight train a year later. From there, he made his way to Geneva, then Paris, surviving by washing cars, working in restaurants and painting the occasional portrait. Born in Casablanca, at the same hour on the same day in the same year as Christo, was Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon. Daughter of a French general, she lived the transient military life, calling Berne and Tunis home before her family settled in Paris for good.
When they met in 1958, it wasn't love at first sight. Christo was commissioned to do a portrait of Jeanne-Claude's mother. "My mother found him charming," Jeanne-Claude recalls. "But I said, 'Mother, he is obviously homosexual. He has long thin hands and he's an artist!'" Her mother liked the art, and Jeanne-Claude grew to like the artist. (She says that her comment on Christo reflects that she was "23 and an idiot.") By the time Christo had painted a Neoclassical portrait, an Impressionist version and a Cubist one, they were in love.
His starving artist days behind him, Christo has put down his paintbrush. The two have traveled widely, creating, lecturing and exercising the freedom that Christo never had in his homeland. Their last names were long ago replaced by a reputation — for avant-garde brilliance or artistic lunacy, depending on whom you ask. Christo and Jeanne-Claude respond to others' opinions with aplomb. They confess a sort of parental pride when people admire their work — "When someone stops a father and mother and says, 'Oh, what a beautiful child you have,' the parents are very happy," Jeanne-Claude says — but emphasize that their work is done to please only themselves. "Our work cannot be justified," Christo explains. "There is no reason for it beyond that we wish to do it as free people."
Perhaps the ultimate expression of this freedom came with the wrapping of the Reichstag in 1995. The longer Christo lived in the West, the more appealing a statement about the East-West political divide became. The Reichstag was ideal, since it literally straddled the dividing line, with a portion of its east façade in what was East Berlin and the rest of the building in West. The idea was actually conceived back in 1971, but the artists' requests for permission were rejected three times, until a 1994 roll call vote in the Bundestag finally went in the project's favor.
The worries weren't over when the wrapping was done. The German authorities, concerned that extremist groups would capitalize on the spectacle and stage demonstrations, planted many plainclothes policemen to keep order. The artists feared that the controversy would lead vandals and opponents to make their own mark — in graffiti, perhaps — and bought plenty of extra silver paint and brushes just in case.
In the end, say the two, the art won out. "There was not one political speech, not one demonstration," Christo marvels, while Jeanne-Claude declares that "the beauty disarmed everything." Both fervently believe that the art itself warded off the "unnecessary trouble" that both they and the authorities had feared. They point out that even opponents came in peace, if grudgingly, to see the wrapped Reichstag. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who vigorously opposed the project and pledged to ignore it, ended up doing a flyover in his helicopter to view the work he'd campaigned for years to prevent.
Their next project, "Over the River," on Colorado's Arkansas River, has also required the legwork and bureaucratic courtship now integral to the creative process. Christo and Jeanne-Claude had to win over federal and state governments, two Colorado counties, three private corporations and 17 other governmental agencies to realize their latest vision — not a wrapping, but the "horizontal draping" of 11 km of fabric over a 66-km portion of the river. The project is scheduled for the summer of 2003 — at the earliest — when thousands of rafters will travel downstream under a temporary ceiling of translucent cloth.
Like all their recent work, "Over the River" will come down after only a brief run. "When the project stays for just 14 days, that creates a sense of urgency, to see and be seen," Jeanne-Claude says. "When you say, "There is a rainbow in the sky," nobody ever answers, 'I will look at it tomorrow!'"
While some may still quibble with the merits of costly art that lasts just two weeks, nobody can question the attention it has brought the pair or doubt that the lives of the bespectacled Bulgarian refugee and his flame-haired French wife have been everything but typical. Nor can they argue with the duo's commitment — they call it an addiction — to works of art that the rest of us either love or love to hate, but always get us talking.
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