Christo and Jean Claude

Husband-and-wife duo Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, who are simply known as Christo and Jeanne-Claude, achieved worldwide acclaim through their large-scale public installations, many of which took years of planning, fundraising, and construction to realize. The pair often created grand works that altered architecture or the landscape. For The Floating Piers, Christo and Jeanne-Claude installed floating walkways on Italy’s Lake Iseo. For their series of public “wrappings,” the artists circled monuments such as the Reichstag and Pont Neuf in fabric. They intended to make their projects free and open to the public and raised funds by selling Christo’s smaller-scale, preparatory drawings and models. Such work has been exhibited in New York, Miami, Berlin, London, and Chicago, among other locations. Works attributed to Christo have sold for six figures at auction and belong in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate, among many other institutions.