Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s largest sculpture in the world may never be built

The largest sculpture in the world may never be built. In the desert of Abu Dhabi, The Mastaba—the monumental project made of 410,000 colored barrels conceived by Christo and Jeanne-Claude—feels further than ever from becoming reality. As tensions escalate in the Persian Gulf, with oil literally going up in flames amid the conflict involving Israel, the United States, and Iran, and Abu Dhabi shifting from tourist destination to place people are trying to leave, the future of the artwork looks increasingly uncertain.  It was in the desert surrounding the capital of the United Arab Emirates that Christo Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon envisioned, in 1977, their only permanent work: the world’s largest sculpture by volume. The structure, made of 410,000 colored barrels, was designed to reach 150 meters in height and span between 300 and 225 meters in width. Yet today, it remains unclear whether the project will ever be completed, especially in light of the current geopolitical situation in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, a new exhibition is shedding light on the many projects by Christo and Jeanne-Claude that were never realized. “Christo and Jeanne-Claude: un|realized”, organized in collaboration with the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation in New York, will open on April 4 at the Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso in Münster. As the only German museum dedicated to the Spanish master, the institution also features one of the duo’s unrealized ideas: wrapping Picasso’s Bust of Sylvette, located on the campus of New York University—just one of many projects that remained on paper.

 Matthias Koddenberg

As curator Matthias Koddenberg—an art historian and long-time collaborator of the artists—told Domus, this work belongs to a category of projects that “were only developed through a few collages and drawings, without ever moving forward to request official approval.” He distinguishes this from a second group of projects “for which the artists worked intensively to obtain permission, sometimes for many years.” One of these is Over the River, which will occupy a central section of the exhibition. The show traces its evolution—from the earliest studies, when even the river location had not yet been decided, to Christo’s first sketches imagining a river covered by a “fabric river,” and finally to the large-scale drawings produced fifteen years later, detailing the project’s development and transformations over time.

The exhibition was conceived with the ambitious goal of presenting something new to German audiences. “We wanted to create a show unlike any other seen in Germany in recent years,” Koddenberg explains. “One way to do that was to reveal what Christo and Jeanne-Claude never realized—or chose not to realize—throughout their long careers.” The duo is best known for their completed works, widely photographed and celebrated. Although similar displays have been presented in private galleries, this marks the first time such a comprehensive focus on unrealized projects is shown in a public museum in Germany. “Very few people are aware of these projects,” Koddenberg adds, “which makes this a unique way to understand their work.”

There is still no exact number of unrealized projects, the curator reveals, “because on some of them Christo and Jeanne-Claude worked for many years; others, however, exist only as one or two preparatory drawings, and we know about them only through letters and correspondence.” However, in total they are estimated to be “around fifty,” about half of which will be included in the exhibition, which will span from early works of the 1960s to the main unrealized project—still in progress—such as The Mastaba, which is expected to be the last project to be realized by the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.

Due to the complexity of the work, after the death of Jeanne-Claude in 2009 and Christo in 2020, the conditional tense has always been necessary—and today, with the war involving Israel, the United States, and Iran, even more so. When will we be able to see The Mastaba completed? According to Koddenberg, “we still don’t know. Christo and Jeanne-Claude began working on it in 1977 and the project is at a very advanced stage. However, there is still no final approval, although the Foundation is working to move this forward. This is the last work for which Christo made all the decisions, both from an aesthetic and engineering point of view, and the Foundation has everything it needs to complete it, since it was his wish to see it finished.”

For now, what conveys the sheer scale of work, time, dedication, and patience of the famous duo will be the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso in Münster, which will illustrate the starting point and how their ideas gradually evolved. The exhibition, the art historian continues, “will extend over two floors, covering a total of six hundred square meters, and will include around one hundred works spanning roughly sixty years, beginning with early pieces, such as the first wrapped objects and photographs of Christo and Jeanne-Claude working in their studio.”

As mentioned, among the most famous unrealized projects in the exhibition is Over the River, which the duo attempted to develop starting in 1992. It was one of the most troubled projects, to the point that in 2017, after twenty-five years, Christo decided to abandon the idea, “even though he had obtained all the permits to realize it,” the curator specifies. “However, those who opposed the work filed a lawsuit against the American government for having approved it, and after years of harsh legal disputes, Christo decided to give everything up.” For those who hope to one day see it realized, a decisive issue remains: “no one,” according to Koddenberg, “would be willing to go through the entire authorization process again, and moreover, there is no such intention on the part of the Foundation.”

Christo

Given the importance of Over the River, in addition to the extensive space dedicated to the project, the exhibition will also feature a short film that will allow visitors to “fully understand what it meant for the two artists to attempt to realize it: from discussions to meetings, from public hearings to design, all the way to full-scale tests.”

Among the works for which the authorization process had not yet been initiated, the public will also find the idea of wrapping Cologne Cathedral, documented through drawings and collages. “The project originated in 1980,” the art historian continues, “when the duo was invited to a group exhibition dedicated to contemporary artists’ perspectives on Cologne Cathedral, the third tallest in the world.” Another interesting project is the one involving the Christopher Columbus monument in Barcelona, “for which, in the 1970s, the duo made great efforts to obtain authorization. After ten years and two refusals by the mayors, approval finally arrived in 1984. However, they refused to proceed because they had lost interest in the idea and, above all, because they were very close to realizing The Pont-Neuf Wrapped in Paris and had just conceived The Umbrellas, which extended across two continents, in Japan and the United States.”

As they explained to Burt Chernow in their only authorized biography, “the temporary nature of a work of art creates a feeling of fragility, vulnerability, and urgency to be seen, as well as the sense that it may disappear, because we know it will not be there tomorrow. The quality of love and tenderness that human beings feel toward what will not last […] is a quality we want to give our work as an additional aesthetic characteristic.”

This sense of precariousness also explains the many unrealized projects, whose obstacles between idea and execution have always been numerous, as Koddenberg confirms: “At the beginning, when Christo and Jeanne-Claude were not yet famous, people did not understand what they had in mind; they saw them as two New York maniacs, as crazy people, and did not trust them. Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, as many projects were realized, people learned to know them and to recognize that they were capable of completing their ideas.”

At the same time, that success became an additional obstacle, as happened with Over the River, where decision-makers, pressured by opposing citizens and voters, blocked the initiative.

 Matthias Koddenberg

Sometimes, the difficulties between the artists and the public also stemmed from the fact that they never wanted to talk about the meaning of their works. “Their projects,” the curator recalls, “were always and only connected to the beauty and joy that people would feel in looking at them or walking through them.” At other times, their works provoked hostility among critics, who considered them useless and meaningless—but this “was exactly what Christo and Jeanne-Claude wanted: for them, art had no purpose other than being art. And being beautiful—or not beautiful.”

Those who visited The Floating Piers on Lake Iseo in 2016 may feel a certain nostalgia in thinking back to those projects now visible only in Wolfgang Volz’s photographs. But what do the unrealized projects tell us about the duo? “They speak to us of their incredible imaginative capacity,” Koddenberg explains, “of how many ideas they developed. The exhibition is a way to enter their archive, to see how these ideas grew and changed over time, and how their focus shifted: from urban public art to the landscape, from wrapping objects to large-scale territorial structures, and finally to buildings.”

Although they declared that they hated propaganda—also because of Christo’s past, having fled communist Bulgaria in 1956—the two artists wrapped buildings that symbolize power, from the Reichstag in Berlin to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. “A very strong meaning,” Koddenberg confirms: “by choosing specific buildings, they inherited their meaning, amplifying the history of those places without adding anything.” From June 6 to 28, the Münster exhibition will intersect with artist JR’s installation in Paris, La Caverne du Pont Neuf, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of The Pont Neuf, Wrapped. “It will tell many aspects,” the curator anticipates, including the fact that the first bridge the duo wanted to wrap was not the Parisian one, but Ponte Sant’Angelo in Rome. When permission was denied, they moved to Paris—first to Pont Alexandre III and then definitively to Pont-Neuf, which they found “the most aesthetically appealing.” Work began in 1975; in 1985, the project became reality.

As Christo once said: “When I arrive in a place, I gently disturb it for a certain period of time.”

Opening image: Christo in his studio with preparatory work for The Mastaba. New York, April 15, 2012. Photo Wolfgang Volz© 2012 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation