Christo and Jeanne-Claude, his late wife, became famous for their extraordinary sculptures, including one that made Italians feel they were walking on water. Now he’s coming to Britain, what surprises can we expect?

Christo is standing in the driving rain patiently surveying the site for his latest artwork, which will rise a whopping 20 metres from the currently choppy waters of the Serpentine lake. His white locks and quilted Issey Miyake coat are flapping about madly as the downpour sweeps through Hyde Park, but the 82-year-old artist looks happy enough.

From our vantage point on the bridge over the lake, we can just about make out dogs romping round the Princess Diana memorial fountain. From June, I learn, this popular landmark will be overshadowed by Christo’s first large British artwork: a giant stack of 55-gallon barrels, numbering 7,506 in all, floating on the lake.

The artist, born Christo Vladimirov Javacheff in Bulgaria, is best known for having wrapped the entire Reichstag in Berlin in a vast silvery curtain, but he did a similar thing to the Pont Neuf in Paris, too. He also stretched a pier across an Italian lake that made visitors feel they were walking on water. Then there was the erection of 7,503 gates hung with saffron-coloured fabric in New York’s Central Park. And now he’s going to float a 150-tonne sculpture on a lake on London.

Is it an allegory of the west’s oil dependency, an indictment of how we’re polluting the planet, or both? Christo shakes his locks and smiles. “I have no reason to justify myself as an artist. I cannot explain my art. Everything I do professionally is irrational and useless.” This, he thinks, is exactly as it should be. “I make things that have no function – except maybe to make pleasure.”

What he will supply in London is some easy-to-access irrational uselessness. “There will be no tickets,” he says, “no reservations and no owners. It will belong to everyone until it’s gone. It will be a landmark for a few months.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Floating Piers by Christo on Lake Iseo, Italy, 2016. Photograph: Filippo Venezia/AP

He and his wife Jeanne-Claude, with whom he collaborated for 35 years until her death in 2009, often worked with barrels because of their sculptural effect and low cost. One early work was a barricade across the Rue Visconti on Paris’s Left Bank. Critics were quick to seize on it as a topical response to the iron curtain, as well as a nod to Paris’s revolutionary tradition, though Christo declines such reductive interpretations. “What I remember is Jeanne-Claude doing a lot of explaining to the police to allow it to stay in place for a few hours. She was very forceful.”

This new barrel sculpture will be called the Mastaba. The what? “The mastaba is a very ancient form,” Christo explains as he and his entourage chat to me over coffee in the nearby Serpentine Gallery. “It originated in Mesopotamia at the time humans moved from agricultural societies to urban ones. It became common as the shape of benches outside the first urban Mesopotamian homes. Later it became associated with pharaohs’ tombs.” It’s a trapezoidal prism, I understand, though not quite pyramidal? “That’s right. The walls are always 60 degrees from the horizontal.”

As well as being 20 metres tall, the Mastaba will be 30 metres wide and 40 metres long. The barrels visible on the top and the two slanted walls will be painted red and white; while the ends of the barrels visible on the two vertical walls will be painted red, blue and purple.



All very interesting, but can I still swim in the Serpentine? “Of course! In fact, that may well be the best place to see my sculpture from.” Assurances have already been given to the swimming club that the Mastaba won’t interfere with their dips. One can understand their worries: the sculpture will rest on a floating platform made of high-density polyethylene cubes anchored to the lakebed. Plus there’s its frame, made of steel beams. How could that not interfere with their bracing morning swims?

Vladimir, Christo’s nephew and major-domo, reassured the swimmers that the sculpture would cover about 1% of the lake’s total surface area and that there was no question of the barrels rolling off. He also described the ecological investments Christo would make as part of the deal: creating new habitats for birds and bats on the island, as well as a water recycling system to protect the lake from algal bloom.

“We will leave the Serpentine better than it was before,” promises Vladimir, who is used to dealing with doubters. “We negotiated for nearly a quarter of a century before we got the OK to wrap the Reichstag in 1995. Christo got death threats from the neo-fascists and from the ex-communists too.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Wrapped Reichstag in 1995, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Photograph: Reinhard Krause / Reuters/Reuters

They aren’t the only ones who have failed to appreciate Christo’s work. For many years, he and Jeanne-Claude planned a project called Over the River. This would involve suspending 10km of reflective, translucent panels over the Arkansas river on steel cables anchored to its banks. These would be so high that rafters could still navigate the river while savouring the sculpture (although looking up while you’re rafting does, to my mind, sound quite dangerous).

Christo spent $6m testing fabrics, conducting environmental studies and negotiating with the authorities, despite some rafters comparing the project to “hanging pornography in a church”. Roar, a protest group whose initials stand for Rags Over Arkansas River, launched a lawsuit.



“It was to be the biggest, maybe the most amazing work of art ever,” says a defiant Christo but, at the start of last year, he cancelled Over the River in protest at Donald Trump’s election. Why? “I don’t want to talk about that today,” he says. Last year, however, he told the New York Times: “The decision speaks for itself.” Except, really, it doesn’t. “My decision process,” he added, “was that, like many others, I never believed that Trump would be elected.”



The looming Mastaba will not be the first work Christo has created in London. In 1963, he wrapped a journalist who’d turned up to do an interview (for the rest of our conversation, I eye Christo narrowly in case he tries to pull a similar stunt). One day, he and Jeanne-Claude visited the studio of photographer and socialite Anthony Haden-Guest. “I wanted to wrap a naked woman,” says Christo, “and Anthony helped me. She turned up to do an interview, not knowing what we wanted, not knowing she would be naked. Then that famous celebrity hairdresser arrived – you know the one?” Vidal Sassoon? “Yes, Sassoon. He did her hair, she took her clothes off and I wrapped her up. There is a lovely film of it that Anthony made. She was called Ruth – I can’t remember her surname.”

Artists - above all architects - seek permanence. I don't. I like leaving nothing. That takes courage

So Ruth became the precursor of all these wrap works. If you are Ruth and want to tell your side of this story, please get in touch. Happily for Ruth, her translucent mummification didn’t last: in an age of incessant commodification and creating for posterity, Christo and Jeanne-Claude always produced temporary works. “Artists – and above all architects – seek permanence,” he says. “I don’t. I like leaving nothing. That takes courage.”

It also takes something else: a disregard for his bank balance. “There’s nothing for collectors to buy,” he says, “nothing for them to collect.” Sometimes all that remains of Christo’s art is the documentary evidence of his trusty photographer Wolfgang Volz.

And yet CVJ, Christo’s company, is flush with cash, which is all the more surprising because he never accepts commissions or sponsorship. Why? “I came from a communist country. Ever since I escaped through the woods from Czechoslovakia to Vienna in 1957, I have been free. I like to be totally free to do the things I want.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1963. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

CVJ has long backed projects by selling preparatory drawings and collages in advance. “Do you know that there is now a course at Harvard Business School that uses three examples – Jobs, Gates and Christo – of how to succeed in business? I am a very successful capitalist.” And so was Jeanne-Claude: the pair have been hailed as virtuosos of the art business deal. “We have always been good at negotiating. And we needed to be, otherwise these projects would never have been realised. But we have always been very good at getting banks to supply lines of credit.”



Christo studied art in Sofia and Prague before deciding, after the Soviet crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, to go west. “I have never been back since. I have no desire to. Ever since 1973, I have been a citizen of America. That is my home.” Then he checks himself: “Not really a citizen of America. Jeanne-Claude used to say, ‘We are citizens of Manhattan, not America.’”



He took a long time getting there though. After setting up in Vienna, he headed to Paris. “I washed cars and dishes to survive. Then I started painting portraits. I signed them Javacheff – which distinguishes the work I did for money from the work I do to be free.”

One portrait commission was of Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon, daughter of a French general whose mother had been a resistance fighter in the war. He fell in love with her. “The painting is now in the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego.” In 1963, though, it became a work by Christo, not Javacheff, when he wrapped it in polyethylene and rope, thereby creating a new work.



Wrapping became a feature of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s art, a technique that, according to critics, is all about aesthetic revelation through concealment. The pair’s little apartment on a Seine islet was filled with wrapped brown paper parcels, bottles and paint cans, as was their originally illegal loft space in Manhattan that became their studio from 1964 onwards.



“She was born the same day as me: 13 June 1935.” I’ve read that Jeanne-Claude became an artist, she said, out of love for you and that, had you been a dentist, she would have become a dentist too. “All true. She dyed her hair red because I suggested it.” The couple collaborated so closely that they always took separate flights, so that if one died in a crash, the other could live on to continue their work. Despite this, for decades Christo got all the credit, a situation they tried to reverse in 1994 by retroactively crediting their creations to “Christo and Jeanne-Claude”. She died of a brain aneurysm and now he lives on to continue their work.



Is the London Mastaba a joint project? “It is. The mastaba form is something we worked on for years.” At the Serpentine Gallery throughout the summer, there will be a show of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s drawings and collages, including those for their long-nurtured plan for an even bigger mastaba 100 miles outside Abu Dhabi. For this mastaba, which would comprise 410,000 barrels and be permanent, the couple negotiated with sheikhs and enlisted the help of French foreign ministers and former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright. So far it hasn’t got the go-ahead, but that doesn’t seem to stop Christo talking about it optimistically.

“It will be 150 metres high,” he says. By my reckoning, that would make it 11 metres taller than the Great Pyramid at Giza. “We have worked out that the footprint of the mastaba will be the size of the Vatican Square in Rome. Nothing in the world has ever been built like that.” He pauses. “It will be like the Eiffel Tower in the desert.”

• Christo and Jeanne-Claude is at the Serpentine, London, from 19 June. The London Mastaba will be completed by June.

