Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wonders of the world

XTO + J-C: Christo and Jeanne-Claude featuring works from the bequest of David C. Copley
Tampa Museum of Art, 120 W. Gasparilla Plaza, Tampa, through Jan. 3. 813-274-8130, tampamuseum.org

A living icon of contemporary art is having an international moment just as an exhibition of his works alights in Tampa.

Christo, the sculptor of unusual wrapped structures in public places — from trees to bridges to islands — may be freshest in the North American consciousness for his 2005 project, The Gates, in Manhattan’s Central Park. Planting 7,503 16-foot tall gates decked with fabric panels in a vivid hue of saffron orange on walkways amidst lush greenery, Christo and his lifelong collaborator and wife Jeanne-Claude transformed the park for 16 days. Someone hailed the intervention as the most optimistic sight in New York since 9/11. Conceived as a golden river through the park, it was typical of a Christo and Jeanne-Claude project: astonishing in scale, playful in tone and ineffably loving.

Then in 2009 Jeanne-Claude, whose flame-red hair and managerial finesse had graced each of the couple’s outdoor projects since 1961, died at age 74. It seemed that the grand love story of their art might have come to a natural conclusion.

But in June 2016, Christo will debut the couple’s latest project — one of three currently under development — on Lake Iseo in northern Italy. Titled The Floating Piers, it will permit visitors to walk on water with the help of narrow bridges constructed out of yellow nylon fabric, again for a period of 16 days. (Quoted in a recent New York Times article, Christo described the intended effect as “very sexy” and akin to treading on a waterbed.) This month, Christo also enjoys a solo exhibition at a commercial gallery in New York — his first in five decades — of drawings and installations from the 1960s that presage the couple’s later, best-known works.

Visitors to the Tampa Museum of Art will find the best of both worlds in the museum’s current show: XTO + J-C: Christo and Jeanne-Claude featuring works from the bequest of David C. Copley. The exhibition of more than 50 works comes on loan from the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, where Copley, one of Christo’s most avid collectors in the U.S., was a trustee. It begins with early drawings of wrapped objects and architectural installations of storefronts that illuminate the impulse toward concealment and play that bloomed in Christo’s work within a broader context of post-minimal sculpture and pop art. It concludes with huge, glossy color photographs of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s fully realized public projects, from their Wrapped Reichstag (the German parliamentary building neatly draped and tucked in silvery polypropylene in 1995) to Surrounded Islands (a 1983 installation that encircled 11 islands in Miami’s Biscayne Bay with fabric in a shade of pink reminiscent of Pepto-Bismol).

The marrow in between consists of Christo’s conceptual drawings of the projects, which themselves are wonders and the sales of which (starting in the mid six figures) fully underwrite the public projects. The drawings fuse hand rendering with collage and schematic drawings of the engineering that underpins the suspension and arrangement of massive amounts of fabric. One exquisite example is a study for Valley Curtain, a 1972 project that hoisted a 200,000-square-foot curtain above a highway between two slopes of a Colorado mountain valley for a brief 28 hours. In the drawing Christo anticipates the project in microcosmic form. A piece of orange fabric is arranged atop a drawing of an earthy landscape, then tucked and shaded with pencil to create a hint of dimensionality that functions remarkably well to evoke the wind-buffeted fabric; below, diagrams of the curtain’s industrial-scale anchors further conjure its formidable presence.

That presence, and the elaborate process behind it, is almost impossible for a museum show to capture fully. Thankfully, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work is well-documented on film. The exhibition incorporates a pair of short documentaries including one that tracks the realization of Running Fence, a 1972 project in Sonoma and Marin counties in California. The film is an improbable nail-biter. It spans the four-year collaborative process necessitated by the 18-foot-tall, 24.5-mile-long silver fabric fence, which extended through the private property of 59 ranchers into the Pacific Ocean. We see Christo and Jeanne-Claude, a charmingly quirky European-via-New York duo (both are Americans, but Bulgarian- and French-born, respectively), soldier through months of consensus-building, environmental negotiations and public hearings as the prospect of failure looms. Finally, the only obstacle left — itself a huge unknown — is to build the fence and string the curtain along it. How the end result sings.

In a public talk at TMA on November 20, Christo discussed his three projects in process, The Floating Piers along with Over the River for the Arkansas River in Colorado and The Mastaba, envisioned for the United Arab Emirates. The latter is unusual in that it eschews wrapping and fabric. Instead, The Mastaba will take the form of a truncated pyramid built out of 410,000 multicolored 55-gallon steel barrels, yielding a work that is 492 feet tall and 300 feet wide. Nor will it be temporary, like the rest of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects. Its installation will be permanent, making the piece — at least temporarily — the largest sculpture in the world.

This article appears in Nov 5-11, 2015.