Christo

The artist and the partnership

Christo Vladimirov Javacheff was born in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, in 1935 and died at his home in New York in 2020. He studied at the Sofia Academy of Fine Arts, found it stifling, fled the country as a railcar stowaway to Vienna, and after a period as a stateless person reached Paris, where he began wrapping ordinary household objects in canvas and rope. There he met Jeanne Claude Denat de Guillebon, born on the same day of the same year as he was, who became his wife and his equal collaborator. For decades the work was credited to Christo alone, partly to simplify the business and partly because of the prejudice a woman faced in claiming authorship; the outdoor projects were later credited to them both.

Temporary works at civic scale

Their projects were enormous, temporary and stubbornly independent. An orange curtain hung across a Colorado valley. A fence of white nylon running for miles through Californian ranch land and into the Pacific. Eleven islands in Biscayne Bay ringed with floating pink fabric. The Pont Neuf in Paris and later the Reichstag in Berlin sheathed in woven cloth. Thousands of blue and yellow umbrellas opened simultaneously in valleys in Japan and California. Each took years and sometimes decades of negotiation with landowners, courts, legislatures and public hearings, and each stood for only a fortnight or so before being dismantled and the materials recycled. The pair refused grants, sponsorship and public money, financing everything through the sale of Christo's preparatory drawings, collages, scale models and editioned prints. That financing model is precisely why so much work on paper carrying his name exists.

The Gates and the late projects

The most protracted of their projects filled the walkways of Central Park in New York with saffron coloured fabric panels hung from thousands of steel gates, a proposal the city had refused for a quarter of a century before a newly elected mayor allowed it to proceed. It stood for a fortnight in February and drew millions of visitors. Jeanne Claude died first, and Christo continued alone, filling a German gasometer with translucent fabric, floating a walkway across an Italian lake, and mooring a mastaba of oil barrels on the Serpentine in London. The wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, planned with her long before, was carried out after his own death.

What a specialist examines

Almost nothing that reaches the market is a finished project, because no project survived. What survives is either a unique preparatory work or a print. The unique collages and drawings, combining pencil, crayon, fabric swatch, map fragments, technical data and photographs, sit far above everything else. Below them are the lithographs and offset editions issued to fund the work, many published in Dusseldorf by Kunstverlag Schumacher and Edition Fils, and these are the sheets most often seen at auction.

A specialist checks the publisher, whether the sheet is signed in pencil, whether the margins are full, and whether an original swatch of project fabric accompanies it, since genuine project material raises a sheet materially. Condition weighs heavily, because the large offset sheets were rolled, posted and handled. The spread is wide even within the print tier: a plain offset sheet from the project editions sold at Rago in 2024 in the mid hundreds of dollars, an example accompanied by an original fabric swatch made several thousand dollars at the same house in 2023, and a pair of signed lithographs made a low four figure sum at Bonhams in 2008.