NEW YORK • Christo, the Bulgarian conceptual artist who turned to epic-scale environmental works in the late 1960s, died on Sunday at his home in New York City. He was 84.
His death was announced on his official Facebook page. No cause was specified.
He had strung a giant curtain across a mountain pass in Colorado, wrapped the Pont Neuf in Paris and the Reichstag in Berlin and zigzagged thousands of saffroncurtained gates throughout Central Park in New York.
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff - he used only his first name - was an artistic Pied Piper.
His grand projects, often decades in the making and all of them temporary, required the cooperation of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people, many of whom had little interest in art and a deep reluctance to see their lives and their surroundings disrupted by an eccentric visionary speaking in only semi-comprehensible English.
Again and again, Christo prevailed, through persistence, charm and a childlike belief that eventually everyone would see things the way he did.
At his side, throughout, was his wife, Jeanne-Claude, who, like her husband, used only her first name. In the mid-1990s, she began sharing equal billing with him on all their projects, formalising what the couple insisted had been their practice all along. She died at 74 in 2009.
The Gates, Christo's Central Park project, typified his approach.
Like nearly all his projects, it began with a drawing, executed in 1979. Then came the seemingly eternal round of lobbying public officials, filing forms, waiting for environmental impact studies, speaking at hearings, rallying support.
All of this, Christo insisted, was part of the artwork.
"For me, aesthetics is everything involved in the process - the workers, the politics, the negotiations, the construction difficulty, the dealings with hundreds of people," he told The New York Times in 1972.
When Mr Gordon Davis, New York's parks commissioner at the time, rejected The Gates in 1981, Christo simply incorporated the rebuff into the project.
The Gates was finally installed in February 2005 after given the go-ahead by the administration of then Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
For two weeks, thousands of strollers wandering 37km of the park's pathways passed underneath 7,503 steel frames supporting free-hanging panels of saffron-coloured fabric.
Christo is survived by his son, Cyril Christo, a wildlife photographer; his brothers Anani and Stefan; a grandson; and two nephews, Vladimir Yavachev and Jonathan Henery, both of whom helped him with his work.
NYTIMES
