Kriston Capps on Jeanne-Claude‘s role in the art world:
In April 1994, married artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude fielded a question during an art-college lecture that forever altered their artistic practice. According to Wolfgang Volz, the couple’s friend and photographer, a man in the audience inquired after “the young poet Cyril, Christo’s son.” Jeanne-Claude, Cyril’s mother, wasn’t mentioned. A discussion the artists, born Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon and Christo Javacheff, had been having for some time about fully attributing their collaborative works to the both of them, and what that might mean economically and aesthetically, was foregrounded by an innocuous question about the couple’s most intimate collaboration. From that point forward — and in revision, as far back as 1961 — the works of Christo became the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
With the death of Jeanne-Claude on Nov. 18, at age 74, comes an opportunity to reconsider her contribution to the greatest collaboration in contemporary art. Out of their partnership came many of the environmental art installations that gave the genre form, including 2005’s The Gates — the celebrated, temporary installation of some 7,000 saffron-colored fabric panels in Central Park. Giving Christo the bulk of the credit — or failing to give Jeanne-Claude her due — misunderstands the enduring significance of their work. While Christo worked primarily on the drawings and models that made their enterprise possible, Jeanne-Claude focused on the fairly enormous behind-the scenes tasks that lend their work its post-Marxist heft.
