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Lot Essay
On 10 August 1972, a team of one hundred construction workers, iterant art workers and art students raised a sweeping, tangerine-coloured nylon curtain across Highway 325 between two mountain slopes in the town of Rifle, Colorado. Valley Curtain (project for Colorado) spanned almost four hundred metres and, at its highest point, soared more than one hundred metres into the air. The spectacle, first conceived more than two years prior, was the brainchild of artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, celebrated for their ambitious environmental and site-specific interventions. Valley Curtain (project for Colorado) offers a profound insight into the duo’s expansive creative vision, fusing a detailed drawing of the proposed valley curtain and its interaction with the surrounding environs with meticulous material and scale annotations. Both artists saw the planning and preparation for each project as an intrinsic part of the work. Executed by Christo, drawings such as the present were fundamental to not only the conception of the Valley Curtain project, but also—as the artists famously refused sponsorship for any of their projects—its financing.
Christo was born in communist Bulgaria in 1935. He left his home country at the age of twenty-one, heading first to Prague before making his way to Vienna, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. After a stint in Geneva, he moved to Paris, meeting his future wife Jeanne-Claude in 1958. In one of their earliest works, as construction was beginning in Germany on the Berlin Wall, Christo and Jeanne-Claude erected Wall of Oil Barrels (1961-1962), an ‘Iron Curtain’ of their own across the Rue Visconti in Paris. The division of Europe remained very much on their minds across the ensuing decade, and it was in 1971, as work progressed on the Valley Curtain project, that they first conceived of wrapping the Reichstag building in Berlin. Creating an arbitrary point of division in the Colorado landscape, the Valley Curtain speaks to still-contemporary themes of border and community. Just twenty-eight hours after the curtain was raised, a gale-force wind in the Colorado area made it necessary to begin dismantling the project. Despite the ephemerality of the installation itself, in drawings such as the present Christo and Jeanne-Claude's ambition and engaged vision lives on.
Christo was born in communist Bulgaria in 1935. He left his home country at the age of twenty-one, heading first to Prague before making his way to Vienna, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. After a stint in Geneva, he moved to Paris, meeting his future wife Jeanne-Claude in 1958. In one of their earliest works, as construction was beginning in Germany on the Berlin Wall, Christo and Jeanne-Claude erected Wall of Oil Barrels (1961-1962), an ‘Iron Curtain’ of their own across the Rue Visconti in Paris. The division of Europe remained very much on their minds across the ensuing decade, and it was in 1971, as work progressed on the Valley Curtain project, that they first conceived of wrapping the Reichstag building in Berlin. Creating an arbitrary point of division in the Colorado landscape, the Valley Curtain speaks to still-contemporary themes of border and community. Just twenty-eight hours after the curtain was raised, a gale-force wind in the Colorado area made it necessary to begin dismantling the project. Despite the ephemerality of the installation itself, in drawings such as the present Christo and Jeanne-Claude's ambition and engaged vision lives on.