BERLIN (dpa) – Celebrated artist duo, Jeanne Claude and Christo, rush through this city’s Martin Gropius building, explaining their credo to a group of journalists and photographers in their wake.
They are a little irritable and under stress. When a newsman accidentally bumps into one of the art works, Jeanne Claude shouts: “You are civilised people I believe. Don’t behave like animals!”
But soon their good humour is restored as they recall what motivated many of their earlier works and sign copies of their “Wrapped Reichstag 1971-95 book.”
Six years after sheathing the Reichstag parliamentary building in shimmering silver-grey fabric, Jean Claude and Christo have returned to Berlin, scene of their most famous “wrap”, for a major exhibition of their early (1958-69) works.
Packages, wrapped objects, oil barrel structures, show cases and store fronts, created between 1958 and 1969, as well as dozens of drawings, sketches and blown up shots of the draped Reichstag stud two floors of the voluminous building.
It’s the biggest show the couple has ever mounted anywhere in the world, and it has taken a huge effort trawling in all the works.
Some 400 works are on display, 384 of them secured from 39 museums and 121 private collections around the world. From countries, as far apart as Australia and Argentina, Israel and the United States, France and Japan.
“Our life is art. We live for art 18 hours a day. To be an artist I fled my country and without art I would have been finished,” Christo, now 66, explains.
Jeanne Claude, who is the same age as her Bulgarian-born husband, says: “Lengthy negotiations were necessary before we obtained permission for all these art works to come to Berlin, and strict promises had to be made about their security here. We’ve never had such a big exhibition”
Both say they’re happy to be back. Berlin after all was the scene of their greatest wrapping triumph in the summer of 1995, one which took 25 years for the pair to realise.
And when permission was finally greeted, millions of people were enthralled at the sight of the Reichstag covered in silver fabric. Critics felt it symbolised a “new beginning” for the Wilhelminian era building.
Certainly, it helped change peoples’ attitudes towards the structure, which though not a Nazi piece of architecture, was somehow tarnished, having languished for decades in a virtual no-man’s area alongside the Berlin Wall.
For Jean Claude and Christo the wrapping symbolised artistic freedom.
“Our art is not there for ever,” Christo once said. “No one can buy it. It only happens because we want it to. No state president, no minister of culture has commissioned it. It is absolutely free.”
Simultaneously, with the Martin Gropius-Bau show, the “Neue Berliner Kunstverein, by means of preparatory drawings, collages, documents and photographs, displays two of the couples’ current works in progress, in a separate nearby building.
One of them is “The Gates” project, conceived in 1979, which would see 11,000 steel-framed gates, each 15 feet high, draped with saffron colour fabric in New York’s Central Park, hopefully for two weeks in the autumn, “sometime in the future.”
The second is the 1992 idea of having fabric panels suspended horizontally above a 10.7-kilometre (around 6.7 miles) long stretch of the Arkansas River in Colorado in the United States. In both cases the couple has yet to win approval from U.S. authorities.
Christo, born in the small Bulgarian town of Gabrovo in 1935, the son of cosmopolitan parents, studied in Vienna and Geneva after fleeing the country in the 1950s.
He ended up in Paris where he met and married Jeanne Claude, daughter of an aristocratic French general named de Guillebon. They have been collaborating on art projects ever since.
Aptly, one of Christo’s first open-air stunts was the construction of a second Berlin Wall, made of used oil drums, across one of Paris’s narrowest streets, the rue Visconti in 1962 – one year after the real Wall went up in Berlin. Bigger projects followed.
His “Wrapped Air Segment” at the Kassel Documenta art show in 1968 won him international acclaim and was followed by the sensational wrapping of 92,900 square metres of Australian coastline near Sydney.
Other projects have included “Valley Curtain,” a 110-kilometre nylon curtain running across the Colorado valley, “Surrounded Islands” the encircling of 11 Florida islands in rings of pink textile, the 1985 “Wrapped Pont Neuf” in Paris and “Umbrellas,” 3,100 yellow and blue umbrellas spread over sites in Japan and California.
But it was the Reichstag wrap which won them most world media headlines, and the enduring love of the Berliners. The two exhibitions open Saturday and run through to December 30.
