The Arc de Triomphe in Paris Will Be Wrapped by Christo in 2020

After decades without carrying out one of his famous large-scale interventions, the Bulgarian artist takes up again one of the projects he imagined with his partner Jeanne-Claude to make it a reality at last.

Christo, L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped  2019. ©2019 CHRISTO/ANDRE GROSSMAN. At artnet.

For many, Christo is known as “the artist who wraps monuments”. Far from this clearly reductionist definition, the Bulgarian artist has always been characterized by his large-scale interventions on landscapes (natural and human), creating ephemeral works that transcend the famous fabric wrappings. For decades Christo worked with his romantic and life partner, Jeanne-Claude; as a team they developed ambitious projects such as the one that wrapped the famous Pont Neuf in Paris, carried out thirty-four years ago. After Jeanne-Claude’s death in 2009, Christo abandoned that side of his work without giving up creation, as the Mastaba built in London in 2018 demonstrates. However, today the artist is in the news again after announcing that he will finally wrap the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, thus culminating a project that began in 1962. The work will be finished and assembled in 2020, coinciding with a retrospective exhibition programmed by the Pompidou Center on the joint artistic career of Christo and Jeanne Claude between 1958 and 1964.

Arc de Triomphe, wrapped (1989). Lithograph by Christo at mike-art-kunst.com

The initiative will be possible thanks to the artist’s collaboration with the Pompidou Center. According to the note sent by the French museum to the media, the assembly will be financed with the sale of the sketches, models and preliminary mock-ups made by the artist. The first of these is dated 1962, the moment in which the creator erected an enormous pile of oil barrels with the intention of collapsing the traffic of a busy Parisian thoroughfare. During the implementation of this artistic intervention, Christo made the first photomontage of a series that will culminate in 2020 with the realization of the project. The Arc de Triomphe, one of the most emblematic monuments of France, which houses the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, will be covered with a mantle of recyclable blue polypropylene fabric of nearly 25,000 square meters; to fix the fabric, 2,137 meters of rope will be used. The work will thus close the cycle begun by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in their formative years, with interventions as celebrated as the one carried out on the Pont Neuf or the one that completely wrapped the German Reichstag building.

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