Thread by @aitorehm

Aw man, Christo Javacheff (the surviving half of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude environmental art couple) has died. He and his wife came up with some really brilliant projects during the remarkable half century during which they brought us really novel ways of seeing the world.

Anyone who grew up in Miami knew their Surrounded Islands project, when they wrapped up 11 islets in Biscayne Bay in Pepto-Bismol pink fabric. It happened back in 1983, but we all heard about it for years afterwards via teachers with prints of the projects tacked on their walls.

But way before that they wrapped part of the coast of Australia, hung a giant curtain across a canyon in Colorado, built a billowing fence across California...

...And in 1985 they wrapped their first monument: Paris's Pont Neuf, the oldest standing bridge in the French capital. It as an extremely delicate endeavor that involved nine years of negotiations with then-mayor Jacques Chirac, but it went off without a hitch and was a hit.

Christo was a Bulgarian who had fled the oppression behind the Iron Curtain by stowing away on a freight train from Czechoslovakia to Austria in 1957. He met Jeanne-Claude, who came from a family of French resistance members, in 1959, when she was engaged to another man.

They began an intense affair, and Jeanne-Claude discovered she was pregnant with Christo's child shortly before her wedding date. Did she call it off? Nope, she got married anyway, but immediately left her husband and settled in with her Bulgarian lover.

Their first major project together was the unauthorized blocking off of Paris's Rue Visconti with barrels as a statement on the construction of the Berlin Wall. It's a credit to the French police that they let the obstruction stand for several hours because, you know, "art".

They'd tackle the symbolism of German division years later, again, with the Reichstag project. The couple had wanted to wrap up the old German Parliament --which had been set afire in 1933, heavily damaged in WWII and poorly restored in the 60's-- since the 1970's.

The idea had been impossible to execute while the wall stood, but after German reunification they lobbied the members of Parliament --at the time, still located in Bonn-- and got them to vote in favor of the projects execution prior to the building's refurbishment.

A special grid was erected outside the old, 1894 building, and a team of 90 professional climbers wrapped it in 100,000 square meters of fabric and nine miles of blue rope in June of 1995.

The result was an international hit that drew over 5 million visitors, and served as an event to create expectation prior to the Reichstag building's eventual reopening as unified Germany's Parliament in 1999.

The couple's last project together was 2005's The Gates in New York.

Jeanne-Claude died of a brain aneurysm in 2009.

Christo remained active and exectued projects like 2016's Floating Piers project in Lake Iseo, Italy.

The couple is gone, but two projects are still pending.

The Mastaba, a project for Abu Dhabi that was conceived in 1977, is set to be the largest sculpture in the world: 410,000 multi-colored barrels that form a mosaic in the desert.

Completion date: Unknown.

The other is a fitting nod to their most famous works.

This October Christo was set to return to Paris to wrap up the Arc de Triomphe.

Because of COVID-19, the project was pushed back to 2021, and we'll have to hope that it will be carried out despite the artist's death.

Fingers crossed, the French capital will create the conditions needed to allow Christo and Jeanne-Claude to end their collaboration in the same place in began half a century ago.