Study for “The Gates” (Project for Central Park, New York City)

1984

Graphite, charcoal, pastel, wax crayon, enamel paint, fabric, and printed map, mounted on board, squared in white for transfer

36 x 30 3/4 in.

Promised gift of Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, Scenes of New York City

IL2021.51.107

The Bulgarian-American artist Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and the French-American artist Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (d. 2009), his wife, worked under the name of Christo until 1994, with Jean-Claude billed as “the manager.” Thereafter, their artistic collaboration was identified as Christo and Jean-Claude. Born on the same day—June 13, 1935 (Jeanne-Claude in Morocco)—they met in Paris in 1958, when Christo painted a portrait of Jeanne-Claude’s mother. They fell in love through creating works of art, and settled in New York City in 1964. Christo, who has been called an artistic Pied Piper, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1973, and Jeanne-Claude a dual citizen of the U.S. and France in 1984. Christo was trained as an artist at the National Academy of Art in Sofia and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, while Jeanne-Claude’s degree was in Latin and philosophy. Christo survived World War II and Stalinization to escape to Paris in the late fifties, where fellow artists like Arman were appropriating common objects and castoffs to rebuke Western consumerism. The packaging of such items intrigued the Bulgarian émigré, as did the potential for surprising viewers of his cloth-wrapped objects, from chairs to Volkswagens. Shaking up mass expectations of public art, especially as a capitalist investment, would underpin his work with Jeanne-Claude, as their projects evolved through Pop and Conceptual art in the sixties into theatrical, environmentally scaled “Land Art” thereafter. The couple’s goals were to revise people’s customary relations to their landscapes and monuments and, ideally, to one another, while the audience was attracted by new, yet transient, communal aesthetic pleasures. Christo began working with political overtones—for example, Wall of Oil Barrels—The Iron Curtain (1961–62), which protested the Berlin Wall —but it taught the couple that blocking a Paris street would not win supporters. Careful negotiations with all stakeholders accompanied their later major projects: the twenty-four-mile-long Running Fence in California (1972–76) ; the wrapping of the Pont-Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris (1985); the pink fabric-skirted Surrounded Islands off Miami (1983); and the wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin (1995). All of these installations were demounted after less than a month. To critics, Christo replied that none of their artworks exist, denying the claim to permanence of conventional public art: “Only the sketches are left, giving my works an almost legendary character. I think it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain.” This work was preparatory for the artists’ most protracted site-specific work, The Gates, begun under the name of Christo and completed as a collaboration with Jeanne-Claude. The diptych format of the study is squared for transfer in the traditional manner for enlarging preparatory works. The upper, smaller section is an aerial view of Central Park with a red line tracing the meandering path that was planned for The Gates around the entire park. Below, Christo envisioned its installation against the skyline of New York early in the evolution of the ambitious piece. The collage reveals that the artist’s concept for the project was fully developed already in 1984, as well as the beauty of Christo’s accomplished draftsmanship. The Gates featured 7,503 vinyl panels hung on steel and vinyl frames installed along twenty-three miles of pathways in New York City’s Central Park for two weeks (February 12–27) in the winter of 2005 (fig. 67). From each fifteen-foot-tall “gate” hung a panel of saffron-colored nylon fabric, which enlivened the wintry landscape as the wind played with these panels. The couple financed the project not only by selling preparatory drawings, like this one, but also through the sale of books and other memorabilia. They made nothing from this or any other of their projects, but invested any surplus in their next endeavor; they never looked for sponsorship. COMMUNITY VOICE I’ll never forget how these bright orange gates stood out amongst the otherwise colorless winter landscape. Walking under the flowing fabric forced me to completely reconsider Central Park. It created a sense of constricted space, heightening the communal experience of urban life in a park typically known for wide-open fields and trails. It was a transformative public art experience that could only have existed in a pre-social media world, and I still have the souvenir fabric swatch from my visit. Mark Hayes Video producer/editor All the preliminary materials refer to the project as The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979–2005, recording the passage of time from the initial proposal, through a myriad of bureaucratic and financial hurdles, to the greenlight for construction. Former Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg described The Gates as one of “the most exciting public art projects ever put on anywhere in the world,” and he added, “it would never have happened without Jeanne-Claude.” On January 3, 2005, installation work began. In the same year, Bloomberg presented the couple with a Doris C. Freedman Award, established to “honor an individual or organization for a contribution to the people of the City of New York that greatly enriches the public environment.” Although The Gates enhanced Central Park only briefly and during one of its bleakest months, the memory and documentation of it remain. Like all of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects, it lives in the recollection of those present—in person or via the voluminous media coverage—and such documentary yet independent artworks as this promised gift.

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