More than a year after his death and 40 years since he first had the idea, famed artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude will have their final work completed: wrapping Paris’ iconic Arc de Triomphe. The iconic structure will be swathed in hundreds of thousands of square feet of silver-blue fabric and almost two miles of red rope. “I like having this commanding metallic quality of the silver, with a bluish reflection,” Christo told art critic Amei Wallach in 2019. “And red ropes! That is the color of the flag of France.”
The project was initially slated for April 2020 but was delayed, first to accommodate the kestrel falcons who nested in the monument and then because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Work began in mid-July, and the full installation will be on view from September 18 to October 3. It’s fitting Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s first posthumous project is being staged in the City of Lights, where the pair met in the 1950s and where they staged their first “public intervention”: In 1962’s Wall of Oil Barrels - The Iron Curtain the pair blocked off a narrow street in the 6th arrondissement with 89 oil drums as a protest against the then-new Berlin Wall.
The first public building they wrapped was the Kunsthalle art museum in Bern, Switzerland, in 1968, followed in 1969 by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. That same year Christo and Jeanne-Claude shrouded a 1.5-mile stretch of Sydney’s Little Bay in a million square feet of plastic fabric. In the decades that followed they draped Paris’ Pont Neuf bridge, the Reichstag building in Berlin, a section of Rome’s Aurelian Walls, King's Beach in Newport, Rhode Island, and other locations.
The idea for covering the Arc de Triomphe predates all those works, though—Christo first sketched it out in 1961, when he lived nearby in a rundown apartment—but it wasn’t formally proposed until 2017, eight years after Jeanne-Claude’s death and three years before Christo’s.
“Christo approved every visual aspect of this project, and in a way it is a memorial to the life and work Christo and Jeanne-Claude created together in Paris and across the world, which always exceeded what we believe to be possible,” Vladimir Yavachev, Christo’s nephew and project manager for the installation, said in a statement.
As with all works from the pair, L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped is as much a feat of engineering as it is art: Some 269,000 square feet of fabric had to be sewn into panels by Geo—Die Luftwerker, a German company that manufacturers hot-air balloons. The material incorporates numerous perforations to limit stress from the wind, and it and the ropes are anchored to the arch by a steel framework that also protects the 19th-century edifice commissioned by Napoleon to honor those who died in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
The four sculptures at its base—Resistance, Peace, The Triumph of 1810, and La Marseillaise—are are shielded by cages that weigh 10 tons each and required delicate drilling into the arch. "It will be like a living object, which will come alive in the wind and reflect the light,” Christo said of the project. “The folds will move, the surface of the monument will become sensual. People will want to touch the Arc de Triomphe."
The $16.5 million endeavor has been self-financed through the sale of preparatory drawings, scale models, and other works. Admission to the exterior is free, but tickets are required to go inside the arch and access the roof terrace. It’s first “wrapping” since Jeanne-Claude's death in 2009. After Christo's passing last year at age 84, his team confirmed the project would go on.
“For me, the most difficult thing about this project is that Christo’s not here. We definitely miss his energy, his enthusiasm, his criticism, everything,” Yavachev told Fast Company. “The most missed is how excited he would be. Because he would get excited like a child, especially at this stage when it’s just coming together.”
