Inhale, Exhale: Christo through Time and Space
Reflecting on the lives and works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the married couple who made some of the biggest things in art…
My first experience of Christo’s art was a pastiche of their monumental work Valley Curtain (1972), mediated through the Saatchi advertising agency in the form of a cigarette commercial. This was before cigarette advertising was outlawed on UK screens. I was in my mid-teens and therefore right in the middle of the target demographic, but instead of selling me the addiction, it sold me art.
‘Christo’ was the brand name of an art production corporation formed by Christo Vladimirov Javachef with his wife, Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, who continued working together until Jeanne-Claude’s death in 2009. They are famous as pioneers of site-specific installations on a grand scale in the environment.
Valley Curtain was one of Christo’s earliest works of such monumental proportions. A vast sheet of orange fabric — 200,200 square feet and spanning 1,250 feet — was installed between mountains and suspended across the valley above Colorado State Highway 325. It was made using an engineering and construction crew and lasted little more than one day before the wind destroyed it.
