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Review
Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Boundless, review: a fitting tribute to the the duo who wrapped the Reichstag
This absorbing, museum-quality new survey at the Saatchi Gallery reveals just how grand, rich and ususual the pair's artistic vision is
Modern art’s story is full of ambitious characters – but few were more determined or visionary than Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the subject of an absorbing new survey at the Saatchi Gallery on London’s King’s Road. Having met in Paris in the late 1950s, the couple – who collaborated until Jeanne-Claude’s death in 2009 – won international renown for their environmental installations, which often involved “wrapping” urban landmarks as if they were packages ready for transportation.
One such piece begins this retrospective: the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in 2021 (represented here by a large photograph), more than five decades after Christo’s first quasi-architectural rendering – on display in the first room – imagining the swaddled monument at night.
What was the meaning of this vast shroud, with its Tricolore-like accents of blue, white, and red? That God’s removal company was about to arrive? There’s often a surreal quality to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s best work, which arrests the ceaseless scurrying of city life, and injects a potent elixir of mystery into the everyday.
Of course, nothing can replicate the experience of encountering one of their epic yet ephemeral installations in the flesh; so, artfully, this show, which tells their story simply and chronologically, considers the artists in the context of their fascinating “Nouveaux Réalistes” contemporaries.
Thus, additional significance is accrued for many of the earlier sculptures, for which Christo – who was born in Bulgaria in 1935, and swiftly ditched his surname (Javacheff) – wrapped small, humdrum objects (magazines, bottles, his studio’s payphone), using sackcloth and polyethylene, thick brown rope, rubber bands, and fuzzy twine. A trussed and bulging “Package” from 1962, for instance, presented alongside an “Anthropometry” by Yves Klein recording, in rich blue pigment, the imprint of a nude female model’s breasts, belly, and thighs, acquires a puckered, corporeal quality, like a corpse within a body bag; nearby, a wrapped sconce could be a veiled Venus.
Similar early works by Christo were shown recently, to great effect, in an atmospheric 18th-century Spitalfields house, in an off-site show by the Gagosian Gallery. Smartly, the Saatchi Gallery’s museum-quality exhibition – which has travelled from Dusseldorf – emphasises these wrapped pieces’ sculptural properties (such as texture and mass), so that we don’t simply consider them as identifiable objects within brown paper packages tied up with strings.
The “high point” of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s career, suggests the show, was the wrapping of the Berlin Reichstag in 1995; it still stretches credulity that such a lofty project, involving a parliamentary building, ever happened – not least because it commented upon power’s opacity.
Mostly, it took Christo and Jeanne-Claude years to execute their ideas – and sometimes the finished works had to be swiftly aborted: in 1972, their “Valley Curtain” in Colorado was dismantled after only 28 hours, due to an approaching storm. As well as presenting a VW Beetle saloon swathed in a mustard-coloured tarpaulin, the final gallery examines their last unrealised project: the colossal “Mastaba”, a sort of trapezoidal, tomb-like structure of 410,000 coloured oil barrels, bigger than the Great Pyramid of Giza, which, if realised in Abu Dhabi (where, of course, the metaphorical significance of those barrels would shift into hyper-drive), would also function as a mausoleum honouring their extraordinary vision. What are those rich-as-Croesus Emirati authorities waiting for?
From Wednesday Nov 15; saatchigallery.com