Christo and Jeanne-Claude
A substantial large-format survey of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work, bringing together preparatory drawings, photographs, and the artists’ own reflections. With text by Paul Goldberger and photographs by Wolfgang Volz, this updated volume traces the development of projects that transformed the experience of architecture, landscape, and public space.
- Publisher
- Taschen
- Year
- 2019
- Format
- Hardcover with dust jacket
- Pages
- 616
Overview
Selected by ZCA
Selected for the breadth of its documentation and the relationship it establishes between artistic conception and realized work. The volume brings Christo’s drawings into dialogue with Wolfgang Volz’s photographs, allowing the reader to consider both the formulation of an idea and its presence in the landscape. Its large format is particularly suited to a practice in which scale, material, and setting are inseparable.
Published by TASCHEN in 2019, this updated XXL monograph offers an extensive account of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s artistic practice. It revisits a publication originally designed by Christo, bringing together early drawings, family photographs, project studies, and documentation of realized works. The expanded coverage includes The Floating Piers and The London Mastaba, alongside proposals for The Mastaba in Abu Dhabi and L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped in Paris, which remained unrealized at the time of publication.
An updated introduction by Paul Goldberger accompanies photographs by Wolfgang Volz, whose longstanding collaboration with the artists gives the book particular documentary significance. The volume also preserves Goldberger’s conversation with Christo and Jeanne-Claude before her death in 2009, bringing their own voices into the account of their shared work.
Across drawings and photographs, the reader can follow the passage from an imagined intervention to its encounter with a particular place. The juxtaposition invites attention to the differences between a project as conceived, represented, and experienced. Substantial in both scale and scope, the volume serves as a reference for the study of an artistic practice that brought sculpture into a sustained relationship with buildings, landscapes, and the public.
Why It Belongs
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work poses a particular question for an art library: how can a temporary encounter with a place be studied after the work itself has disappeared? Drawings and photographs offer different forms of access. The drawings articulate possibilities through line, color, texture, and spatial construction; photographs record the realized project within the circumstances of its setting.
This distinction makes the volume especially relevant to collectors interested in Christo’s works on paper. A drawing can be considered as a material and visual object in its own right while also being understood in relation to the larger project it anticipates. Reading across these forms of representation brings greater precision to the understanding of the artists’ practice.
Within the ZCA Research Library and Shop, the book provides a substantial point of connection between drawing, sculpture, architecture, and landscape. Its value lies in the breadth of material it makes available for comparison and in the opportunity to return closely to projects whose public existence was often brief.
Publication Details
- Full title
- Christo and Jeanne-Claude
- Author(s)
- Paul Goldberg
- Publisher
- Taschen
- Place of publication
- Cologne
- Year
- 2019
- Edition
- Updated Edition
- ISBN
- 978-3-8365-6699-5
- Binding
- Hardcover with dust jacket
- Pages
- 616
- Dimensions
- 15 3/8 x 11 1/2 x 2 1/2 in
- Language
- English, French, and German
Condition
Very good. A clean copy in dust jacket, with a minute surface loss at the lower-left corner of the front jacket panel.