The New York Times
By AMEI WALLACH
Excerpts
HRISTO calls Jeanne-Claude "Amour." When he is agitated, which is often, he calls her "Cherie," as in "Nononono, Cherie!" When he decides to let her win, he says "Madam." Then he kisses her. It is necessary for him to do this carefully, since she wears a wide slash of Orange Slip lipstick, which she reapplies often. The lipstick is calculated to clash with her hair, which is a species of the bordello red once standard in B westerns.
"Nononono, Cherie, please!" Christo is saying one recent afternoon in their downtown Manhattan digs. He is vainly trying to deter Jeanne-Claude from emptying the contents of a bulky manila folder labeled "The Gates, Project for Central Park, New York City" onto a coffee table laden with books about their monumental art projects.
Christo doesn't really want to talk about "The Gates" right now. He'd rather talk about "Christo and Jeanne-Claude in the Vogel Collection," a four-decade survey of their work currently at the National Gallery in Washington. There one can see photographs and drawings of the Reichstag they wrapped with silvery fabric, of the 11 islands in Biscayne Bay, Florida, they surrounded with hot-pink cloth, and the 1,340 blue umbrellas they deployed across the rice paddies of Japan.
"Central Park is like the Mona Lisa of landscape architecture," says Christo. "The conservative vision is that the park should be closed like the Metropolitan Museum. If they had a chance they would charge for tickets, like a museum. On the liberal side, the park is the only place where underprivileged people can go in the summertime; the only place."
They turned their focus elsewhere; they are accustomed to projects that take time to mature. It took 24 years and the fall of the Soviet empire to get the permissions that led to the "Wrapped Reichstag" in 1995, when five million visitors went to view the emblem of Germany's cataclysmic history swathed in a million square feet of billowing silvery drapery.
"We used to say that we have to live with the consequences of the `Wrapped Reichstag' on our shoulders," Jeanne-Claude says. She pauses theatrically. "People were telling us, `We do not want five million visitors here.' Now, I do not believe that the City of New York in the present situation does not want visitors, and a good influx of visitors."
Christo and Jeanne-Claude have lived and worked in a former industrial building a block north of Canal Street since 1968, the year they proposed wrapping the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and No. 1 Times Square. None of those projects were realized. In fact, there has never been a Christo and Jeanne-Claude project in New York City, even though they like to say: "We don't live in America at all. We live in New York, Manhattan."
They were born on the same day, June 13, 1935; he, the son of the owner of a small chemical factory (later nationalized under communism) in Bulgaria; she, who became the step-daughter of a French general, in Morocco. She's the pedagogue, driving home sound bites with pointed fingers, repeating them in case you didn't get it the first time. He's the dreamer, the artist in the pre-Warhol sense, romantic and visionary, with fly-away hair. The new United States edition of their biography, "Christo and Jeanne-Claude," by Burt Chernow (St. Martin's Press), tells it all.
The wrapped packages in the exhibition — including one from 1961 which preceded the Christos to the United States — are touchingly pathetic, poetic and handmade, like the prized possessions of 20th-century refugees, with whom Christo and Jeanne- Claude still strongly identify.
The drawings, for all their insouciance, are working documents, conceptual in purpose, assembled with relevant engineering studies, contour maps, street plans. Among these are plans for their other current venture, "Over the River, Project for the Arkansas River, Colorado." For that, they propose to roof a 40-mile section of the river with intermittent segments of shimmering transparent panels, which will be experienced differently from cars passing above or from rafts below. "Over the River" is currently making its slow way through the environmental assessment stage. Thus far it has cost the Christos $1.75 million.
"At the start of a project we never know what it is," Christo says. "And this is so exciting, because the permitting process gives all the soul, all the energy to the work. It is not invented by us."
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