Christo Javacheff is an environmental artist. Together with his wife, Jeanne-Claude, Christo creates sculptures by wrapping buildings and other locations in fabric and found objects, like street signs, umbrellas and even old telephones! Each piece is temporary and is sometimes taken down after just a few days.
Christo Javacheff was born on June 13, 1935, in Gabrova, Bulgaria. His father was a scientist, and his mother worked at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia. As a child, Christo was interested in theater and put on plays for his family. He was also artistic, and as a teenager, Christo enrolled as an art student in the Sofia Academy. In 1956, Christo left Bulgaria to continue studying art in Prague. But he was unhappy living in a communist country and felt that he could not be a true artist because of all the strict rules. So, in 1958, Christo escaped to Paris, France.
While living in Paris, Christo painted portraits to earn a living. However, his dream was to create larger-than-life sculptures. In 1960, Christo met Jeanne-Claude, and in 1961, the two artists created their first large public sculpture by covering shipping barrels with fabric. The following year, Christo received lots of attention when the two created another sculpturethis time they blocked off a small street in Paris with oil barrels! People were upset because traffic could not get through, but the police allowed the sculpture to stay for a few hours before Christo removed it.
Since then, the couple has created many more environmental piecessome extremely large, like Running Fence, a veiled fence that ran for 24 miles along the countryside in northern California. Another famous piece they created in 1991 was The Umbrellas, which used 3,100 scattered blue and yellow umbrellas in two different locations, one in Japan and the other in California.
Christo has lived in New York City since 1964. In 1973, he finally became a U.S. citizen. His newest sculpture, Over the River, is still in progress. For this piece, Christo and Jeanne-Claude plan on hanging more than six miles of fabric panels above the Arkansas River in Colorado!
Written by Tamar Burris, a former elementary school teacher who now works as a freelance writer and curriculum developer for PBS, the Discovery Channel and other education-related companies. Sources: Christo and Jeanne-Claude, www.christojeanneclaude.net; Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org; Nancy Doyle Fine Art: Artist Profile: Christo and Jeanne-Claude, www.ndoylefineart.com.
