[Added on May 6, 2020: good news! The exhibition is now open to the public. You just have to wear a mask, wrapping yourself :)].
The book Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Projects 1963-2020. Ingrid & Thomas Jochheim Collection
should accompany the exhibition at PalaisPopulaire Berlin from March 21 until August 17, 2020. The exhibition is one of the many victims of SARS-CoV-2.
Luckily, the exhibition catalogue Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Projects 1963-2020. Ingrid & Thomas Jochheim Collection (bilingual English & German) is available at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
The catalogue cover shows a partial view of their spectacular 1995-project called Wrapped Reichstag which, twenty-five years ago, attracted a broad public across all social classes.
Friedhelm Hütte underlines in the catalogue that this is the second solo exhibition at Berlin’s PalaisPopulaire dedicated to one of the world’s most famous artist couples: Christo and Jeanne-Claude. They succeeded in breaking through the narrow boundaries of the art business and attracting the interest of the masses for their spectacular large-scale projects.
Ingrid and Thomas Jochheim loaned some seventy works to the exhibition Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Projects 1963-2020. Ingrid & Thomas Jochheim Collection. On display are works created between 1963 and 2019, including early objects, many large-format drawing tableaux, as well as several editions and prints. These exhibits are accompanied by photographs by Wolfgang Volz, a close confidante of the artist couple, who documented many projects and whose photographs are an integral part of their artistic work.
After wrapping everyday objects in foil and with strings—from stacks of magazines to VW Beetles—Christo and Jeanne-Claude increasingly devoted themselves to artistic transformations and accentuations of entire landscapes or architectures.
The earliest or one of the earliest such projects is not mentioned in the book. On June 27, 1962, Christo and Jeanne-Claude closed a narrow street in Paris (Rue Visconti) with a wall of 89 oil barrels. The art barricade was a protest against the Berlin Wall which had been built in August of 1961. Wall of Oil Barrels – The Iron Curtain.
Friedhelm Hütte mentions in his catalogue foreword that, from 1962 to 2019, twenty-three projects were realized on various continents. Since the death of his wife in 2009, Christo has continued the projects he planned with her. All of them are exclusively financially supported by the sale of preliminary studies, original lithographs and editions to a stable base of activists and supporters. You can call it a kind of “grassroots movement”. Christo and Jeanne-Claude never let big companies sponsor them.
Christo’s drawings are much more than just sketches of ideas, drafts, or construction instructions. They bear an individual signature in their lines, hatchings, lighting and coloring. In addition, the collaged plans, materials, fabrics and photographs, and the identical acrylic glass covers, make them unmistakable, even unique. And they show what a great draftsman Christo is.
Matthias Koddenberg writes in his catalogue essay that, before the age of 21, Christo (*1935) fled from Communist Bulgaria to the West in 1957. He bribed a railway employee, fled to Vienna in a sealed freight wagon and applied for political asylum. In March 1958, he arrived in Paris.
In his tiny studio, he produced an eclectic artistic output ranging from Cubist or Fauvist-inspired still lifes and landscapes to abstract drawings, paintings, reliefs and sculptures. Hardly anyone wanted to buy his works. To make a living, he engaged in what he later described as ”prostitution”: he painted portraits of rich society ladies.
Christo met Jeanne-Claude (*1935 in Casablanca, Morocco – † 2009 New York, USA) when he painted her mother’s portrait in October 1958. First, there was friendship, then love and, finally, an artistic partnership from 1961 onwards. For three decades, Jeanne-Claude played the role, assigned to her by society, of Christo’s wife and right hand, before the two declared in 1994, that from now there would only be “Christo and Jeanne-Claude” as equal partners.
Matthias Koddenberg describes how Christo began to “appropriate” everyday objects, deprived them of their function, and, by putting them under wraps, preserved them permanently for posterity. The first works had been created as random artistic experiments. However, the transformation of everyday objects and places quickly became the central theme of his art. He primarily regarded the objects as physical things and not as bearers of meaning. He was concerned above all with the texture, the form, and not so much with the content.
Soon, Christo was no longer satisfied with small-scale objects. His works became bigger, more complex and extended further and further into the surrounding space. He took a decisive step towards the later large-scale projects conceptually in the early 1960s, but especially after the couple’s move to New York in 1964. The production of his works became so complex that he began to prepare them with sketches and drawings. This info and much more you can find in the catalogue.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects aim to raise awareness of social and historical processes through veiling. In particular, the transformation of the parliament building in reunified Berlin in 1995 hit the nerve of the time. More than five million visitors from all over the world came to see Wrapped Reichstag.
Last, but not least: The projects of Christo and Jeanne-Claude have no claim to permanence. Rather, they thrive on the appeal of unrepeatable eventfulness. Only the sketches and photographs remain.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Projects 1963-2020. Ingrid & Thomas Jochheim Collection. Bilingual English & German, Kerber Verlag, 2020, 168 pages, 48 colored and 14 b/w illustrations. Order the softcover book / the exhibition catalogue from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
This publication is partially based/Diese Publikation beruht in Teilen auf Christo & Jeanne-Claude. Photographs by Wolfgang Volz. Works from the Ingrid and Thomas Jochheim Collection, exhibition catalogue/Ausstellungs-Katalog Mönchehaus Museum, Goslar (Distanz Verlag, Berlin), 2018.
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations from the book reviewed here are not put between quotation marks.
Book review added on April 15, 2020 at 14:04 Swiss time. Place and year of death added for Jeanne-Claude at 14:51.
