The Wrapped Arc de Triomphe is Christo’s Temporary Gift to Paris


PARIS — For almost 60 years the artist known as Christo dreamed of wrapping the Arc de Triomphe. As a young man fleeing communist Bulgaria, he would stare at the monument from his small penthouse apartment. A 1962 photomontage shows the 164-foot-tall arch roughly huddled together. Freedom overpowered the sacred. He always wanted people to look again at things that maybe they hadn’t seen.

Now, a little over a year later Christo’s death At 84, “L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped” is a fact. Nearly 270,000 square feet of silvery-blue fabric, shimmering in the changing light of Paris, embraces the monument commissioned by Napoleon in 1806 at the dizzying height of its power. The polypropylene material, with its hue reminiscent of the city’s distinctive zinc roofs, is secured with approximately 1.9 miles of red string, but not rigidly held, according to the artist’s exacting instructions.

“He wanted a living object that would transform the surface of the monument into something sensual with its moving curves,” said Vladimir Yavachev, Christo’s nephew and project director. Suddenly, at the top of the Champs Élysées, a magical pale object beckons, with its luminous lightness secured by steel plates weighing 150 tons. The effect is confusing and riveting at the same time.

Yavachev moved from New York to Paris two years ago to lead the project. The job has been tough. France’s Bird Protection Association has expressed concern about two hawks nesting high on the front. This led to the first delay before the pandemic caused a second.

Bastille Day, July 14, and Armistice Day, November 11, when ceremonies at the monument took place, left a limited window. It was laborious to construct lattices with steel bars an inch or two past the outstretched hand or foot of a frieze or a funerary relief. So was going down to work under the ledges of the cornice. In total, 1,200 people worked on the packaging.

“It was tough and stressful,” said chief engineer Sebastien Roger as he stood under the belt. “You have to be careful, the Arc de Triomphe after all!”

From its official opening on Saturday until October 3rd, the arch has actually become something else – an oversized imaginary object by the liberating obsession of an artist who refuses to accept boundaries. Born into the stifling oppression of the Soviet empire, Christo—whose full name was Christo Vladimirov Javacheff—always had one basic guiding idea: the inalienability of freedom. When the Berlin Wall was raised in 1961, he built a wall of oil barrels on Rue Visconti in Paris, his first defiant public statement.

“I think that’s what we believe in: crazy dreams should be possible,” said President Macron, standing at the Arc de Triomphe this week. The wrapping of a monument that is a repository of military, historical, artistic and national memory “made the French people extraordinarily proud,” he suggested, “because that’s what the artistic adventure is about.”

There were some grunts. Florian Philippot, a right-wing politician, denounced “a garbage bag draped over one of our most magnificent monuments”. Italian architect Carlo Ratti asked in the daily newspaper Le Monde if it was environmentally acceptable to use large amounts of fabric to wrap a monument. In fact, almost all of the materials used are recycled, Yavachev said.

As with all of Christo’s major projects, no sponsors or donors were accepted. The wrap was fully funded by the artist’s estate. “My uncle always told me that if you are responsible to someone, you have no freedom,” Yavachev said. “Remember, at the art school in communist Bulgaria, the villagers in his painting were criticized by the authorities for not looking happy enough! That was too much for him.”

Roselyne Bachelot, minister of culture, said: “The Arc de Triomphe has been taken from our gaze and at the same time overexposed our gaze. This subtraction and this overexposure is at the core of the work. Christo gives us another, new way of looking at masterpieces made by other artists. Thank you for presenting your gift.”

The Arc de Triomphe, like any great monument, was built to last. Christo’s conceptual art is ephemeral. It will be dismantled in weeks. There is something liberating about it, perhaps because the fleeting nature of the job makes it impossible to have. The work is enormous, but unfounded. The fabric seems to mean something nomadic, in keeping with Christo’s own peripatetic life.

After living in Paris for many years, he moved to New York as an illegal immigrant with his wife, Jeanne-Claude, between 1964 and 1967, after which he became a green card and citizen in 1973. she opened her arms to him, he was stateless for 17 years. Freedom meant something. America was also an idea.

This isn’t the first time Christo has wrapped a Parisian icon. In 1985, after many years of battling the authorities for permission (he was an expert in the bureaucratic war of attrition often necessary to achieve his goals), the artist Pont Neuf and 44 streetlights on the bridge in a sandstone-coloured fabric. Its installation was visited by three million visitors over its two-week lifetime.

Permission to pack the Arc de Triomphe, a project sponsored by Macron and Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, came faster – even if those hawks and Covid make life difficult. Engineer Roger said that from July 15, teams were working in shifts 24 hours a day to do the preparatory work.

The belt was only partially covered with fabric once before. In 1885, on the occasion of the funeral of the beloved poet and writer Victor Hugo, a large black shroud was hung from the monument. More than two million people attended the funeral, which led from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pantheon where Hugo was buried.

Christo loved Paris. It was its second city, along with New York. “I miss the excitement of my uncle, he used to jump around!” said Yavachev. It has been a difficult year for the French capital, where curfews are frequently imposed due to the pandemic, and restaurants and cafes, which are the connective tissue of the city, have been closed for a long time. So “L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped” feels like a liberating moment, a massive piece of public art that huge crowds would flock to.

“Christo makes us suffocate, poke, talk,” Hidalgo said. “Paris, echoed by his ephemeral work, plays with the sky and light.”

A few years before he died, I met Christo in Doha, Qatar. During a 45-minute interview, he refused to sit down and spoke with irrepressible vigor. Eat less, she advised, to channel energy (in her case, garlic yogurt for breakfast, then until dinner). Decide what you want – the hard part – and apply yourself to that goal without compromise. He was so determined that a posthumous study in Paris, which Yavachev describes as his uncle’s spirit “everywhere around me”, bore fruit.

The Arc de Triomphe is versatile. It began life as a monument to military victory. The names of Napoleon’s great battles are engraved on it. It was a tribute to a victorious emperor. But war is also a terrible loss, as the 20th century has shown. In 1920, two years after the First World War, the tomb of the unknown soldier was placed under the arch. It reads “A French soldier who died for the Fatherland 1914-1918”. An eternal flame burns.

The presence of the tomb made it impossible for military parades to pass under the arch, as if declaring the war was futile.

During the project, the tomb was meticulously respected. Every evening at 18:30, those who tended to the flames succeeded in completing their mission. “The unknown soldier has been in his shroud for 100 years,” one of them told reporters on Thursday. Christo left us early and is now in his shroud. And I believe this temporary cover is telling us that the belt has been rolled up, but you’ll see it again soon – so there’s a kind of unity around us.”

The wrapped Arc de Triomphe – light, breathing, shimmering – certainly speaks of anything but war. After completing a project, Christo said, “We did it!” he liked to say. Yes, he even did it from beyond the grave. Freedom is also a violent act of imagination.



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