The poignant image now on Christo’s and Jeanne-Claude’s homepage
I got a chance to talk at length with Jeanne-Claude, who died last night at the age of 74, back in 2005 when “The Gates” captured the imagination of all New Yorkers, not to mention visitors from around the world. This glorious transformation made me see my childhood haunt, Central Park, with fresh, enlivened eyes, and the project created a bond among all of us who were fortunate enough to experience it.
Although the early obits have stressed her equal partnership with her husband Christo, Jeanne-Claude was first among equals when it came to handling the logistical and financial details of their projects. She was also the lead spokesperson when it came to dealing with the press, as I discovered when I conducted a joint phone interview with the couple for my Wall Street Journal piece about “The Gates.”
This statement from the Common Errors section of their joint website succinctly defines their division of labor:
There are 3 things Christo and Jeanne-Claude do not do together:
They never fly in the same aircraft.
Jeanne-Claude
does not make drawings, she was not trained for that. Christo puts
their ideas on paper; he never had an assistant in his studio.Christo never had the pleasure of talking to their tax accountant.
When it came to the pleasure of talking to the press, Jeanne-Claude was friendly, frank and funny.
Here’s an excerpt from my WSJ article:
“The Gates”…were briefly in play, when one New York
dealer, representing a collector, offered the artists $10 million for
50 of the fabric-festooned frames. Jeanne-Claude amusedly recounted, in
a joint phone interview with husband Christo, that the rebuffed agent
gamely doubled his offer to $20 million.“Nobody can buy this project,” declared Christo. “Nobody can charge
tickets for this project, nobody can own this project—because
freedom is an enemy of possession and possession is the equal of
permanence. That is why this project should go away.” According to
Jeanne-Claude, the Brooklyn Museum also learned this lesson when it
requested four of the gates. Its director, Arnold Lehman, said he knew
nothing of this, but a museum spokesperson, Sally Williams, suggested
that a curator might have initiated the inquiry.
They were (and are) the real deal: Their partnership necessarily had its business component, but it wasn’t about the money. It was the means to the end of enthralling the art pilgrims who flocked to their improbable, impractical projects with the mystery, beauty and rapture of their boundless imagination.