On Feb. 12, 2005, the husband-wife artist duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude unveiled the biggest, splashiest and most talked-about public art project New York City had ever seen.
“The Gates” caused an immediate sensation. It featured 7,503 steel structures adorned with flowing saffron-colored banners, and spanned 23 winding miles in Central Park.
Four million visitors flocked to see the monumental installation during its 16-day run. The spectacle generated an estimated $254 million for the NYC economy. (Christo and Jeanne-Claude paid the $21 million it took to erect it).
Most importantly, however, it brought a jolt of color and whimsy to a city that was still mourning in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The gates imbued the gray February skies with a warm glow, and popped against the park’s snowy landscape.
It’s hard to imagine 20 years later, but Christo and Jeanne-Claude struggled for decades to do one of their large-scale installations in New York City, and faced quite a bit of resistance. “Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates and Unrealized Projects for New York City” — an anniversary retrospective running through March 23 with an exhibit at The Shed and an augmented reality experience in Central Park — demonstrates their extraordinary persistence.
The couple not only spent more than 20 years trying to bring “The Gates” to life, but also had a dozen other ideas for the Big Apple that never came to fruition. These included wrapping the Whitney Museum in packing materials, covering the Cloisters in fabric, and erecting a wall of 441 oil barrels in the middle of 53rd Street.
“New York was their city,” said Vladimir Yavachev, Christo’s nephew who began working for the couple in 1990, when he was 17. He is now the project director at the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation. (Jeanne-Claude died in 2009, and Christo in 2020.)
“They came here in 1964, and they didn’t want to live anywhere else,” he told The Post. “Maybe it was because it was their hometown, but they had a lot of ideas for New York City. It was important for them.”
Christo and Jeanne-Claude were born the same day, June 13, 1935. They met in Paris in 1958, when Christo — who had fled communist Bulgaria to pursue art — was commissioned to paint a portrait of Jeanne-Claude’s mother. The two fell in love and came to New York City in February 1964. They lived briefly in the legendary Chelsea Hotel before settling into 48 Howard St. in Soho, where they would stay until their deaths.
“At the time, the art world was shifting to New York,” Yavachev said. “It was the place to be.”
Christo and Jeanne-Claude proposed their first public art project for Manhattan the same year they landed in the city. They wanted to wrap two downtown skyscrapers in fabric. They proposed wrapping other buildings and statues. In 1968, they drafted several ideas for MoMA installations, which never materialized.
In 1979, Christo had a vision of putting gates in Central Park. New Yorkers largely opposed the plan. Residents wrote to the Park Department, arguing that “The Gates” would ruin Central Park, which at the time was in dire disarray. The city denied the artists a license for the project in 1981. But, in 2003, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg approved the project. The rest was history.
“They didn’t want to be defeated in their hometown,” Yavachev said. “It was very important for them, and they really believed it would be beautiful.”
Here, a look at some of their other visions for the city.
Lower Manhattan Packed Building (Project for 20 Exchange Place), 1964
Packed Building (Project for 1 Times Square, Allied Chemical Tower, New York), 1968
Whitney Museum of American Art Wrapped (Project for New York), 1967
Photo: Eeva-Inkeri
Christo and Jeanne-Claude arrived in New York City in February, 1964, aboard the S.S. France. Seeing the tall buildings in Lower Manhattan from the bow of the ship inspired them. They decided they wanted to wrap a pair of skyscrapers in fabric.
Christo had wrapped cans, oil barrels and other objects before, but seeing the scale of the structures in the Big Apple inspired him to dream bigger. “Wrapping is a way to reveal something through concealing it,” Yavachev said. “It reveals the form, cleans away all the details, so it looks like the building took a little breath, but also the fabric moves with the wind, so the building looks alive.”
It’s also, when done on such a large scale, “a way to involve the public that may not normally be involved in art and aesthetics and beauty in any way, to be involved in that.”
The pair selected various NYC buildings to wrap, including the former Whitney Museum (now known as the Breuer Building) and 1 Times Square, but were never able to move forward with any of them.
Projects for the Museum of Modern Art, 1968
In 1968, Christo and Jeanne-Claude proposed various projects for MoMA, and worked with the chief curator there to make it happen. These included wrapping the museum building, wrapping trees in the museum’s outdoor sculpture garden and creating a mastaba of stacked oil barrels in one of the museum’s galleries.
The museum’s insurance company, however, warned the museum that it would no longer cover the building if the artists tried to wrap the museum. Instead, the museum exhibited some of Christo’s preparatory sketches and scale models for their unrealized projects. The exhibit, which opened in June, 1968, was called “Christo Wraps the Museums: Scale Models, Photomontages, and Drawings for a Non-Event.”
Wall of Oil Barrels at 53rd Street (Project for the Museum of Modern Art, New York), 1968
Christo and Jeanne-Claude had an obsession with oil barrels. “They were so easy to stack and you could paint them all these different colors,” said Yavachev. “You could use them almost like pixels.”
The couple erected their first oil barrel wall in a very narrow street in 1962. “It was called ‘The Iron Curtain,’ it was a poetic response to the Berlin Wall, and it was the only project they did not have permission for,” Yavachev said. “They tried to get permission, and they never got it, and they did it anyway. It was up for 24 hours, and the the police let them go and said, ‘Never do it again.’”
After that they tried to get permission for several oil barrel structures in New York, including a wall of 1200 of then in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in 1967. But the craziest was a proposal to block midtown traffic by erecting one on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, by MoMA. “The Wall,” as it was called, would comprise 441 barrels in Modrian-esque colors and span the entire width of the street.
“They really thought they might get permission,” Yavachev said. “They thought that with all their projects, that’s why they proposed them. I mean, you wouldn’t think you would get permission to put 7,503 gates in Central Park. But they got it. It took years, but they got it.”
