The flame-haired artist Jeanne-Claude — or Mrs Christo, as she sometimes called herself — worked with her husband to mummify the Pont Neuf, to envelop a string of Miami islands in flamingo-pink nylon, to bind the German Reichstag building in aluminum fabric and to erect 7,503 billowing, saffron “gates” in Central Park, New York. She has died aged 74, from complications of a brain aneurism suffered after a fall.
Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon was born in Casablanca, Morocco, where her father, a French general, was stationed at the time. She was born on exactly the same day as her husband and collaborator, Christo Javacheff.
“Both of us at the same hour,” Jeanne-Claude liked to say, “but, thank God, two different mothers.”
PHOTO: EPA
She often acted as spokesperson for the pair, explaining that as “twins,” they had an almost symbiotic relationship and spoke in one voice (usually hers).
“Sometimes we would both have the same idea at the same time,” she said. “You know how people who live with a dog start looking like their dogs?”
She was much more than simply his muse or manager. Until 1994, all their artworks bore only Christo’s name, apparently because they thought it would be easier for one artist to become established, but since then the pair have shared the credit. It was entirely her idea, Christo said after the fact, to create Surrounded Islands (1980-1983), which used 550,000m² of pink fabric to outline an archipelago in Miami as if with a highlighter pen (“a giant Pepto-Bismol spill,” one critic said).
Christo retroactively corrected the record and now they are acknowledged as joint authors of every outdoor installation they plotted from 1961 onwards. That year Christo proposed the wrapping of their first building, the Ecole Militaire in Paris.
She met Christo in 1958, soon after he moved to Paris from his native Bulgaria, where his father owned a textile factory. Influenced by Man Ray, who in 1920 wrapped a sewing-machine in a blanket, bound it with string and photographed it to illustrate the surrealist’s famous definition of beauty — “the chance encounter of a sewing-machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” — Christo had begun to parcel objects. In his humble attic studio, he wrapped cans, bottles, shoes, chairs — which he considered his “real” art and autographed with his first name — while paying his way by washing dishes and painting conventional portraits, which he signed with his surname.
Jeanne-Claude’s mother was impressed with a Javacheff portrait she spied at her hairdresser’s, and invited the struggling migrant to the family chateau to paint one of her. Their debutante daughter remembers seeing the artist at work and remarking: “Mother’s brought home another stray.”
She assumed Christo was gay.
“He is so skinny,” she said to her mother, “and he’s got long thin hands — and he paints.”
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