Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Prints and Objects

Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Prints and Objects, published by Hatje Cantz, introduces the reader to the life and works of a legendary artist couple. Born on the same day, Christo Vladimirov Javacheff in Bulgaria and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon in Morocco, the artists met in Paris in the 1950s and began a long, fascinating collaboration in environmental art. The couple is best-known for projects in which they covered entire buildings and landscapes in various materials. Edited by Jörg Schellmann, the book consists of 280 pages.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude: the man with the glasses and the woman with the red hair. Each one was born on the same day in 1935, and this unusual artist couple worked together until Jeanne-Claude’s death in 2009, changing the art world in the process. In large-scale actions they enveloped buildings and entire landscapes in various materials, revealing at the same time their essence and beauty. In order to finance these enormous works of art by themselves, Christo and Jeanne-Claude began making editions early on in their career—prints, collages, and objects. This completely revised, expanded, and updated catalogue of works, Prints and Objects, is testimony to the artist’s impressive scope and to their courage. Who else would have had the idea of building a 120-meter-tall truncated pyramid out of 410,000 oil barrels in the desert of the United Arab Emirates?

Christo (1935–2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935–2009) were an artist couple who became known from the 1960s onwards primarily for their jointly realized spectacular wrapping projects, such as the wrapping of the Reichstag building, the Valley Curtains, and most recently Christo alone with the Floating Piers.