Retrospective in the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf: Christo, unleashed – culture

There it is, the Reichstag, shimmering silver and surrounded by people. The dimensions of the original can only be guessed at despite the huge format of the photo in a gallery room in the Düsseldorf Kunstpalast. Anyone who was not there, in June and July 1995, when Christo and Jeanne-Claude realized their long-cherished wish to wrap the Berlin Reichstag building, must be satisfied with the colored reflection. This impression of the ephemeral is even reinforced by the flanking materials shown in the same room – the masterfully drawn drafts, the pieces of packaging material, the numerous examples of the media accompanying the project.

All of Christo’s and his wife Jeanne-Claude’s major public projects were like this: meticulously prepared, spectacular and then irretrievably over. The dimensions of his most famous projects, including the “Surrounded Islands”, the covered Pont Neuf, the “Floating Piers”, were gigantic. The numbers for the latter project alone are dizzying: 220,000 pontoons moored together, 195 anchors, all covered with kilometers of bright yellow fabric, attracted around 1.2 million people to Lake Iseo in Lombardy in 2016.

An artist with selfie-ready mass appeal

There have been other major exhibitions of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work, for example in 2001 at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. The Düsseldorf show, which has just started, with the subtitle “Paris. New York. Boundless” is the first posthumous retrospective of a completed oeuvre. Christo himself gave her his placet in the initiation before his death in 2020. Nevertheless, one may well doubt whether a museum viewing of Christo can be more than circling around the archival periphery, even if, like the Kunstpalast, it draws on such a comprehensive collection as that of the married couple Ingrid and Thomas Jochheim. The largest concrete work shown is a packaged VW Beetle – the recreation of a packaging that Christo made here in Düsseldorf in 1961 with an identical car. But the large works can of course only be exhibited in the form of drafts and photos.

The fact that the large autumn exhibition at the Kunstpalast does have more to offer is mainly due to the serious and convincing art-historical contextualization of the early Parisian work, in which many aspects of Christo’s later works are already laid out and in which his influences become clear. Academic art historiography has never really warmed to the leptosome Bulgarian – not least because of his selfie-capable mass appeal, which he himself always understood and propagated as the democratization of art.

In Düsseldorf, it becomes clear how strongly Hristo Vladimirov Yavashev, born in 1935 in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, the son of the general secretary of the art academy in Sofia and a chemical entrepreneur, was influenced by his contemporaries, especially by Nouveau Realisme. Coming to Paris via Prague, Vienna and Geneva in 1956, he painted portraits to earn a living. This is how he met his future wife and equal partner, the Moroccan officer’s daughter Jeanne-Claude. At the same time he developed a fascination for materials, for the three-dimensionality of paintings. In addition to a drip painting that is obviously influenced by Jackson Pollock, a kind of crater landscape can be seen on canvas. The juxtaposition with works by Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana with their surface manipulation makes Christo appear much less as an artistic solitaire.

At the same time Christo starts with the first packaging objects. The act of covering is more important than the object, be it that picture-Newspaper or a bicycle. In 1968, after the couple moved to New York, he wrapped a nude woman for the Institute of Contemporary Art. The fetishistic aspect of this practice was probably nowhere else so clear. The fact that a small etching by the surrealist super-fetishist Hans Bellmer, incorporated into a tableau collage by Daniel Spoerri, hangs next door is a subtle but enlightening decision by curators Kay Heymer and Sophie-Marie Sümmermann.

Open detailed view

A room is dedicated to the different versions of the “Mastaba” project, with sketches drawn and a large-scale model. The mastaba, an ancient Egyptian tomb building tapering upwards with a rectangular base, two vertical and two sloping walls and a flattened roof, was to be erected at various locations from colorful oil barrels. On the site of the Dutch Kröller-Müller Museum it remained unbuilt, in the desert of Abu Dhabi it is still considered “in planning” and on the London Serpentine Lake it was put into action in 2018 with 7506 barrels. One remembers how Christo, together with Serpentine curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and the American billionaire Michael Bloomberg, quickly circled the property on a small barge and Bloomberg, a potent financier, predicted that the installation would bring the British capital additional tourist income of around 150 bring in millions of pounds. This was a far cry from the artist’s first larger oil barrel work, which can also be seen here as a wall-sized photo: In June 1962, Christo and his wife took part in a kind of guerrilla action – also as a reaction to the construction of the Berlin Wall – on the Rue Visconti in Paris 200 barrels barricaded, although the city authorities had not given permission. A small iron curtain in the middle of Paris.

Later, the approval process, which, as in the case of the Reichstag wrapping, could take almost a quarter of a century, became an integral part of the project for Christo. A documentary film on the history of the Berlin work can be seen in Düsseldorf, including footage of a visit by the then SPD chairman and former Berlin mayor Willy Brandt to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s New York studio in October 1981. Christo kept talking to Brandt ( “I’ve done more in America to raise awareness of the Berlin Reichstag than your ambassador!”) and tries to find out how he can get the President of the Bundestag, Richard Stücklen, to see a Christo show in Cologne.

Surprising insights into the genesis of the major projects

The tenacity of lobbying in this small scene makes it easier to understand how the artist always managed to put his plans into action. He then left the interpretation of the completed implementation to the visitors and only said things like: “Every interpretation is legitimate, positive or critical. It should stimulate thinking. Thinking makes us human!”

Even if the eventful nature of the large wrapping projects in Düsseldorf is very clear – you were there or you missed them – you get some surprising insights into their genesis in the Kunstpalast. The site-specific and ephemeral character of monuments and landscapes modified for a short period of time, which allowed people to repossess them, underscores the genuinely egalitarian attitude of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. They were actually concerned with what so many institutions are supposedly trying to achieve today: participation.

“Christo and Jeanne-Claude – Paris, New York, Boundless” at the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf until January 22, 2023. kunstpalast.de; Catalog 38 euros.