F-Arty Friday – Art and Love and Destiny with Christo and Jeanne-Claude

If you’ve ever wondered about fate, consider that artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude were born at the same hour on June 13, 1935, in different countries. They met twenty-three years later, when Christo was commissioned to do a portrait of Jeanne-Claude’s mother and the rest, as they say, is history.

The two artists lived together and worked jointly on many art projects until Jeanne-Claude’s death in 2009. Their work challenges what many of us think of when we hear the word “art.” If that word conjures up images of old oil paintings hanging on stark gallery walls, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work will make you think again.

How about wrapping up a famous building in 100,000 square meters (1,076,000 square feet) of fabric?










Or how about decorating two valleys (one in California, and one in Ibaraki, Japan), with over 3,000 umbrellas, and getting almost 2,000 people to open them all at sunrise on the same day?


Or adorning New York’s Central park with 7,503 saffron fabric panels, mounted on saffron colored poles, to represent the gates for the park that were planned, but never installed?

This is art you can experience, on a large scale—for free!

According to the artists’ website:

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's works are entire environments, whether they are urban or rural. The artists temporarily use one part of the environment. In doing so, we see and perceive the whole environment with new eyes and a new consciousness. The effect is astounding. To be in the presence of one of these artworks is to have your reality rocked. You see things you have never seen before. You also get to see the fabric manifest things that cannot usually be seen, like the wind blowing, or the sun reflecting in ways it had not before.
The effect lasts longer than the actual work of art. Years after every physical trace has been removed and the materials recycled, original visitors can still see and feel them in their minds when they return to the sites of the artworks.

There is no other way to describe that the feeling of that effect other than to say it is magical.

Each projects took years to come to fruition, because of permits and environmental impact studies. In fact, it took 24 years to get the permit for the Wrapped Reichstag!

The artists paid for their projects with their own money (earned from selling Christo’s work to collectors, dealers, museums and galleries), because they wanted total freedom over their ideas, devoid of any input or restrictions from others.

Today, Christo continues to work on a project the couple planned together, called Over The River. ) If he secures permits, he plans to suspend 5.9 miles of fabric panels high above a forty-two mile stretch of the Arkansas River in Colorado. He hopes to exhibit Over The River for two weeks in August, 2014.

If you’re interested in learning more about this latest installation, or getting involved, visit http://www.christojeanneclaude.net.

***All photos from www.christojeanneclaude.net