Take two intertwined lives marked by childhood turmoil, geographic displacement, fierce ambition, and total dedication to a quixotic form of art, add a lively narrative style and you have Christo and Jeanne-Claude by Burt Chernow. In 1959, French socialite Jeanne-Claude fell in love with a penniless Bulgarian portrait artist just beginning to wrap small objects in canvas. She had no way of knowing that her life would one day involve a constant round of negotiations with politicians, government agencies, fabricators, factory owners, truckers, laborers, farmers, and everyone else whose good will, expertise, or elbow grease were needed to make Christo's gigantic projects happen. Chernow seasons this cheerfully uncritical authorized biography of the masterminds of such projects as "Running Fence" and the "Wrapped Reichstag" with evocative sketches of the '60s art world. An epilogue by Wolfgang Volz, a photographer close to the couple, engrossingly recounts their struggles and triumphs in the '80s and '90s. --Cathy Curtis


From Library Journal
Though Christo (Christo Javacheff) was born in Bulgaria and Jeanne-Claude (Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon) in French-controlled Casablanca, the curious coincidence of their shared birthday (June 13, 1935) is just one more tie in their joint personal and professional lives. In his exemplary dual biography, the first full-length treatment of these artists, Chernow (founder of the Housatonic Museum of Art in Connecticut) traces their wildly differing early years (he was a penniless exile from Bulgarian communism, while she was the beautiful daughter of a wealthy French military family) through their meeting in Paris in the early 1960s, the slow rise to fame as Christo's avant-garde minimalism caught on with critics and collectors, their early success in New York, and on to the creation of the seminal monumental "wrapped" works that define Christo to the world at large. Chernow clarifies the couple's lifelong collaboration and justifies the artists' recent self-billing as cocreators of their major works. Chernow's narrative ends in 1983, owing to his death, leaving longtime Christo/Jeanne-Claude collaborator Wolfgang Volz to bring the biography up to date with a personal epilog. Chernow meticulously re-created the ambiance, adventure, and aesthetics that surrounded the creation of major projects such as "Wrapped Coast" (Australia, 1968-69), and the reader will miss the stories behind later major projects such as "The Umbrellas" (Japan and California, 1984-91) and "Wrapped Reichstag" (Germany, 1971-95). Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
What induces an artist to undertake such complicated, dangerous, and ephemeral projects as covering a rocky Australian coastline in synthetic fabric, hanging a colossal curtain across a Colorado valley, or wrapping the Reichstag? Christo, the Bulgarian-born mastermind behind numerous unprecedented, large-scale, politically volatile, and, after the dust settles, sublime and unforgettable creations, has courageously challenged assumptions about art for more than four decades. A man of phenomenal energy, vision, and passion, he's remained an enigma in spite of his renown, as has his collaborator and wife, Jeanne-Claude. This unusual couple, who share the same 1935 birthday and who fell in love under scandalous circumstances in 1959, didn't declare their "artistic interdependence" until 1994. Chernow, who knew the resilient and intense pair well, recounts their dramatic life stories and chronicles the arduous technical, financial, legal, and public relations efforts involved in their monumental projects, establishing beyond doubt the true symbiotic nature of their partnership. Sadly, Chernow died before completing this captivating work, but it will stand as the keystone biography of a truly revolutionary artist and his soul mate. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"What induces an artist to undertake such complicated, dangerous, and ephemeral projects as covering a rocky Australian coastline in synthetic fabric, hanging a colossal curtain across a Colorado valley, or wrapping the Reichstag? Christo, the Bulgarian-born mastermind behind numerous unprecedented, large-scale, politically volatile, and, after the dust settles, sublime and unforgettable creations, has courageously challenged assumptions about art for more than four decades. A man of phenomenal energy, vision, and passion, he's remained an enigma in spite of his renown, as has his collaborator and wife, Jeanne-Claude. This unusual couple, who share the same 1935 birthday and who fell in love under scandalous circumstances in 1959, didn't declare their 'artistic interdependence' until 1994. Chernow, who knew the resilient and intense pair well, recounts their dramatic life stories and chronicles the arduous technical, financial, legal, and public relations efforts involved in their monumental projects, establishing beyond doubt the true symbiotic nature of their partnership. Sadly, Chernow died before completing this captivating work, but it will stand as the keystone biography of a truly revolutionary artist and his soul mate."
—Donna Seaman, Booklist



Review
"Christo and Jeanne-Claude are as much adventurers and gamblers as artists. They love the action. There is something of the mischievous child in them, devising then accepting their own near-impossible dares. They are guerrillas dedicated to subversion, their schemes greeted with disbelief. Perhaps they find perverse delight in watching jaws drop as people hear of their plans to build a fabric-covered processional through their hometown park, surround islands with flaming pink fabric, construct a gargantum structure in the desert, or wrap a bridge, monument, or government building. Taking on greater odds, their ideas appear simultaneously familiar and wildly alien, evident yet enormously complicated, obvious but rich in ironic subtexts."—Burt Chernow

"What induces an artist to undertake such complicated, dangerous, and ephemeral projects as covering a rocky Australian coastline in synthetic fabric, hanging a colossal curtain across a Colorado valley, or wrapping the Reichstag? Christo, the Bulgarian-born mastermind behind numerous unprecedented, large-scale, politically volatile, and, after the dust settles, sublime and unforgettable creations, has courageously challenged assumptions about art for more than four decades. A man of phenomenal energy, vision, and passion, he's remained an enigma in spite of his renown, as has his collaborator and wife, Jeanne-Claude. This unusual couple, who share the same 1935 birthday and who fell in love under scandalous circumstances in 1959, didn't declare their 'artistic interdependence' until 1994. Chernow, who knew the resilient and intense pair well, recounts their dramatic life stories and chronicles the arduous technical, financial, legal, and public relations efforts involved in their monumental projects, establishing beyond doubt the true symbiotic nature of their partnership. Sadly, Chernow died before completing this captivating work, but it will stand as the keystone biography of a truly revolutionary artist and his soul mate."—Donna Seaman, Booklist



Book Description
For their sheer scale and breathtaking audacity, their works have made them among the most celebrated and controversial artists in the world. Valley Curtain stretched 1,250 feet across a valley in Rifle, Colorado; Wrapped Coast covered a mile and a half of Australian coastline with a million square feet of fabric; The Umbrellas deployed 3,100 umbrellas set in Japan and California, each nearly twenty feet tall; Surrounded Islands encircled eleven islands in Biscayne Bay, Florida with six and a half million square feet of bright pink fabric; and Wrapped Reichstag enveloped the entire German parliament in shimmering silver fabric.

For more than forty years, these and many other works by Christo and Jeanne-Claude have reconceived the art of the possible, turned natural and human monuments-streets, bridges, hills, trees, buildings, parks, and islands-into sculptures and paintings, and created dazzling new landscapes and startling new vistas. Often requiring years, even decades, of preparation and planning, these works-not merely feats of aesthetic daring but engineering and organizational marvels-exist for only a few weeks or less. Yet what makes these transient creations linger forever in the mind is their overwhelming and magisterial beauty. They are, in every sense, transformative, and, for the millions who have experienced them in person, unforgettable.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been the frequent subjects of films, videos, catalogues, cartoons, monographs, exhibitions, and editorials. Until this biography by Burt Chernow, however, written with the full cooperation of the artists, nothing has connected the intimate details of their lives and the spectacular dimensions of their projects. Christo, the penniless Bulgarian refugee who made his way to Paris during the 1950s, and Jeanne-Claude, the socialite daughter of a prominent French general, seemed an unlikely couple, yet together they forged one of the most enduring partnerships in contemporary art. When they arrived in New York in 1964, Christo was already becoming well known in avant-garde circles for his wrappings of everyday objects; Jeanne-Claude acted as manager, dealer, and accountant. Over time, as Chernow reveals, the fusion of their prodigious gifts-his drawings and her ability to draw things together-produced the works for which today they are known the world over.
Chernow recounts their rise from relative obscurity to international renown, revealing both the sources of their art and the heights to which it has quite literally aspired. An epilogue by Wolfgang Volz, a longtime and close collaborator of the artists, as well as their exclusive photographer, provides a fascinating insider's view of what it is like to work, and dream, with them. Christo and Jeanne-Claude is an indelible portrait of the artists and their work, and a moving account of an extraordinary couple.



From the Inside Flap
"Christo and Jeanne-Claude are as much adventurers and gamblers as artists. They love the action. There is something of the mischievous child in them, devising then accepting their own near-impossible dares. They are guerrillas dedicated to subversion, their schemes greeted with disbelief. Perhaps they find perverse delight in watching jaws drop as people hear of their plans to build a fabric-covered processional through their hometown park, surround islands with flaming pink fabric, construct a gargantum structure in the desert, or wrap a bridge, monument, or government building. Taking on greater odds, their ideas appear simultaneously familiar and wildly alien, evident yet enormously complicated, obvious but rich in ironic subtexts."
— Burt Chernow



About the Author
Burt Chernow lectured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was a professor of art history at Housatonic College in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He was also the founder and Director Emeritus of the Housatonic Museum of Art. The author of many books and essays, he died in 1997.

Wolfgang Volz's photographs have appeared in Art, GEO, Paris Match, Der Spiegel, Life, and Time magazines. He has worked with Christo and Jeanne-Claude since 1972 and is the exclusive photographer of their work. He was also technical director of the project to wrap the Reichstag. He lives with his wife, Sylvie, in Dusseldorf, Germany.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Together, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have created masterworks -- such as the "wrapped" series of pieces, "Iron Curtain," "Wrapped Coast," "Running Fence," and "Umbrellas" -- that have caused controversy, challenged convention, and quite simply redefined contemporary art. In this first authorized biography of the artists, Burt Chernow traces the personal history and artistic journey of two of the most enigmatic figures of our time. Meticulously researched and amply detailed, the trajectory of their shared vision is revealed in this detailed account. (Unfortunately, Chernow died just prior to the completion of this biography; longtime Christo and Jeanne-Claude collaborator Wolfgang Volz wrote the final chapter.)

By some cosmic coincidence, both Christo Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude Marie de Guillebon were born on the same day in 1935, in cultural and economic circumstances that couldn't have been more different. Christo, the son of intellectual but poor Bulgarian parents, was repeatedly thwarted in his artistic education by the Communist stranglehold of censorship and propaganda. At 22 he escaped the Soviet Union in a freight car and eventually make his way to Paris, then considered the epicenter of the art world. In contrast, Jeanne-Claude was born to privilege, and though she faced considerable hardship during World War II, her teens and early 20s would be a whirlwind revolving around Parisian high society and various frivolous pursuits. However, when the two joined forces -- she was at first merely a neophyte champion of his work but eventually became a fully recognized "coauthor" -- they would together play a pivotal role in shifting the axis of 20th-century art from Paris to New York and defining a new genre of postmodern art.

The couple's formative years are recounted with fitting drama, and Chernow provides a precise academic account while illuminating the elusive emotional motivations that go into the making of an artist. The enormity of effort required to realize über-projects like the 25-mile-long "Valley Curtain" is recounted with all the histrionic zeal it deserves. Evocative and enlightening, Chernow delivers an intimate portrait of the larger-than-life artistry of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. (Ann Kashickey)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"For their sheer scale and breathtaking audacity, the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude have made them amongst the most celebrated and controversial artists in the world. Valley Curtain stretched 1,250 feet across a valley in Rifle, Colorado. Wrapped Coast covered a mile and a half of Australian coastline with a million square feet of fabric. The Umbrellas deployed 3,100 umbrellas in Japan and California, each nearly twenty feet tall. Surrounded Islands encircled eleven islands in Biscayne Bay, Florida, with six and a half million square feet of bright pink fabric. Wrapped Reichstag enveloped the entire German parliament in shimmering silver fabric." Chernow recounts their rise from relative obscurity to international renown, revealing both the sources of their art and the quite literal heights to which it has aspired. An epilogue by Wolfgang Volz, a longtime close collaborator of the artists, as well as their exclusive photographer, provides a fascinating insider's view at what it is like to work, and dream, with them. Christo and Jeanne-Claude is an indelible portrait of the artists, their work, and of an extraordinary couple.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal