Christo, Sculptor of Massive Public Art, Dead at 84, Created Newport Installation

Christo, Sculptor of Massive Public Art, Dead at 84, Created Newport Installation

ARTnews is reporting the artist Christo has died at 84.

In 1974, he caused great controversy in Rhode Island when for a period of 18 days, he created 150,000 square feet of white woven polypropylene floating fabric covering the surface of the water of a half-moon-shaped cove at King's Beach in Newport, Rhode Island.

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Christo, who with his partner Jeanne-Claude used sculpture as a means to dramatically shift people’s understanding of iconic structures and sites, has died at 84. According to a press release put out by the artist’s office, Christo died on May 31 of natural causes.

“Christo lived his life to the fullest, not only dreaming up what seemed impossible but realizing it,” the artist’s office said in a statement. “Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s artwork brought people together in shared experiences across the globe, and their work lives on in our hearts and memories.”

The news comes as Christo was to take on one of his most ambitious projects to date, a sculpture that would see Paris’s Arc de Triomphe wrapped in 269,097 square feet of fabric. Titled L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped (Project for Paris, Place de l’Étoile – Charles de Gaulle) and first conceived in 1962 by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the project is still expected to be executed in September 2021, the artist’s office confirmed in its death notice. (The Arc de Triomphe wrapping was originally expected to take place this year, but it was re-dated because of the coronavirus pandemic.)

With Jeanne-Claude, Christo created some of the most iconic sculptures of the past half-century. Many involved temporarily sheathing well-known buildings in hundreds of thousands of square feet of fabric, effectively deconstructing and reconstructing the way we think about how those structures function with respect to the surrounding landscape. Among the structures wrapped by the couple were the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris, Biscayne Bay in Miami, and the Reichstag in Berlin.