Christo
Wrapped a bridge, a Reichstag, a coastline and an island, and sold drawings to pay for it.
Christo Javacheff was born in Bulgaria in 1935, escaped to the West in a sealed medical supply train in 1957, and met Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon in Paris the following year; from 1961 everything was made jointly, though it was credited to Christo alone until 1994. The projects are temporary, enormous and famously self-financed: the Pont Neuf wrapped in sandstone fabric, eleven islands in Biscayne Bay ringed in pink, twenty-four miles of fence across California, the Reichstag in silver polypropylene in 1995, and 7,503 gates in Central Park. Jeanne-Claude died in 2009 and Christo in 2020, before the Arc de Triomphe was wrapped to their plan in 2021.
They accepted no sponsorship and no grants, and paid for everything by selling preparatory work — which is why the drawings, collages, scale models and lithographs exist in quantity and are the entire secondary market. A large mixed-media collage combining drawing, fabric, photograph, map and technical note, relating to a realised project, is the top of it. Unrealised projects sit lower. Editions and offset posters are numerous and inexpensive, and are often mistaken for the unique preparatory works, which they resemble closely in reproduction.
If you own a work by Christo
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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