Cultured Magazine

Franklin Sirmans: What was the impetus for you to become an artist? Christo: I owe everything to my parents, like every child of course, but for me it's very important because my mother was involved with art. She was working for the National Academy of Arts in Bulgaria. She told me that when I was a little boy I was drawing all the time so she decided that I needed private lessons. After school I was going to the studio of a real painter who painted with oil paint, making sculptures with wire, acetate to make scale models, cut-outs, everything. Every day instead of doing what children usually do, piano lessons or something, I was going to artists—not from the school, real professional painters. After that, in high school, I was seriously interested in world art and studio art, even during the communist time when things became very difficult. When I finished I applied to the Art Academy in Bulgaria, the School of Visual Art. I was accepted but the school was under a very old-fashioned system. In Bulgaria, everything in the early 20th century was modeled after the Kunstacademie in Vienna and Munich. You did an eight-year study, like medical school. The first four years you study everything: painting, sculpture, decorative art, architecture. I even had two semesters of medicine and depiction of the human body. After these four years, you decided what to be: architect, painter, sculptor or in the decorative arts. FS: And you went to paint. C: In the early '50s. Around '52, I was going to this school, but it was the height of the Stalinist period, just before Stalin died and after, when the doctrine of fascism was being very strongly implemented in art school. I was suffocated. Bulgaria had no historical art collection and nothing about modern art. Even Van Gogh was considered a decadent artist. I had relatives in Prague, and I was really desperate during these first four years at art school because there weren't any modern shows to see. I thought I should do everything possible to go to another country, but because my family was persecuted by the communists, I did not have any rights to do anything, not even rights to learn another language. I was only learning Russian and speaking Bulgarian. But that urge to go out was so unstoppable that I did, finally. During the summertime I decided to try my chances and go to Prague. I bought a train ticket, but in the summer of '56 something incredibly important in my life happened—there was a Bulgarian revolution in Budapest. There was an uprising against the communists, and when summertime arrived in Budapest, there was a huge fear that World War III would start and there would be no way to go to Prague by train. The only way was by plane, and I remember at the last moment I desperately tried to find money to buy a ticket to fly from Sofia to Prague, which was the first time I had taken a plane in my life. I arrived by myself. I had my student card from the University of Art in Bulgaria and I was thinking even if Prague is still a communist country, it's better and I'd like to stay there. This was the first time I had the chance to see original works of Picasso and Paul Klee. They were in the basement of the National Gallery. FS: So you were able to stay? C: My idea was to not go back to Bulgaria. I was surviving by making paintings of friends and people in Prague and then I was eventually able to get to Vienna, not speaking anything except Bulgarian and Russian. I survived doing all kinds of odd jobs, washing cars, working in garages. In Vienna I became stateless with no passport, no nationality. I was a refugee. I wanted to go to Paris where everything was happening. I made portraits for the refugee officials of their children and families and they advised me to try to find my way to Geneva, Switzerland. In late August or September of 1957, I arrived in Geneva and I started to make money making portraits of friends of the UN people, and I worked very hard and finally, thanks to them, I was able to arrive in Paris in March of 1958. FS: And you were able to continue painting the whole time? C: Yeah, signing with my family name "Javacheff." The abstract work or modernistic work I was signing with "Christo." FS: So you knew you were doing something very different between the representational work and the abstract work? C: It's like a writer who writes with a pseudonym to write books that sell very well. I was "writing" portraits of children, wives and gentlemen and very big French families. Jeanne-Claude's father was the huge hero of the French Resistance, he was a four-star general and a personal friend of General de Gaulle. That was how I met Jeanne-Claude. Actually, I did a portrait of Jeanne-Claude for myself and signed it Javacheff, then I wrapped that portrait with plastic, like my wrapped magazine, and signed on the wrapped portrait Christo. This portrait is in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. FS: This is the sign of a very different artist. How did the work change from being about painting and where you came from? C: I was already doing these abstract pieces. I had the address of a friend of my father's, a German friend who studied in Vienna with my father, called Mr. Rosenkranz. And when I arrived in Paris I wrote to him that I was in Paris, and one good day Mr. Rosenkraz arrived at my little room—one room with no water. In the summer of '58, he bought the first wrapped can, a little tube. FS: What made you wrap the can? To start? C: I started right away. I was not a painter. When we wrapped the Reichstag, the first critic the New York Times sent was not an art critic but an architectural critic. In truth, the wrapped Reichstag was a type of new architecture from the start. I had not yet decided what I am. FS: Absolutely, you do something very different. C: The way the projects are built is very similar to how architects today work, how they build bridges. They're completely outside of the milieu of how normal art is practiced. FS: Completely! Just like the Miami project, Surrounded Islands, in 1983. C: The sculptures were very free and the work required a high level of skill. I involved readymade objects like a paint can, sometimes adding buttons of yellow fabric—but they're very free, not static sculptures. They can be arranged differently. All these early and late '50s pieces now belong to the Tate Gallery. I remember they bought it at auction, but I gave the original collector instructions that the piece can be composed differently—there's not one way to do it. FS: What was the first installation you and Jeanne-Claude did together? C: We had our first exhibition in Cologne in 1961. That's when the galleries had a little space on the ground floor and I would put little cans or wrapped bottles like goods in the store windows. The gallery, like all the galleries, was in a very industrial area near the harbor of the Rhine River. They were closed Sunday and Monday, and Jeanne-Claude and I decided to do a temporary installation in the harbor yard using the merchandise and some stacked barrels. This was the first temporary installation we did together. And the people over the weekend could go see artists working outside, not in a gallery or in a museum. FS: It's a completely different way of thinking about art. C: It is historical in a way because that summer, something extremely important was happening in my life, related to many other projects: The Berlin Wall was built. And of course, I was a political refugee. I left Germany thinking like in Soviet times, we won't go with Germany. They were fighting and there were these horror stories. Everybody thought a third world war would start. I went back to Paris and I proposed in September of 1961 to do our Iron Curtain, blocking this small street in Paris, Rue Visconti, with barrels. FS: The idea that the work existed outside of galleries or outside of normal art that you look at on a wall is very important, but the other idea that you say here is that you had such a concern for people and humanity and what was happening in the world. C: I was concerned about myself, to be very frank. I thought I'd be sent to Siberia—I was so scared! For 17 years I lived like a political refugee. It's not real life, it's horrendous pain and suffering. For all those years I didn't see my parents. I'm very allergic to politicizing the works of art. They should be as they are, that is the true work of art—instead of becoming propaganda. Because I was scared of the Berlin Wall, I was so much a part of the boulevard and what was happening culturedmag.com 211 PHOTO BY WOLFGANG VOLZ. © CHRISTO 1983

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