The only natural choice

The Pont Neuf Wrapped, Project for Paris
1975-1985
aerial view
Polyamide fabric and rope
Foto: Wolfgang Volz

No other bridge in Paris is so thrilling, so laden with cultural and historical importance. Many artists in the past have painted the bridge, among them J. M. W. Turner, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Paul Signac, Pablo Picasso and Albert Marquet, and others. Furthermore, since ancient times, the building of a bridge has had an aura of the religious, and has partaken of ritual significance. Speculation was rife among the controversialists: wrapping the bridge would harm it, or those who crossed it or passed below, or would rob the stone of its original appearance, or would otherwise desecrate a cultural totem.

The Pont Neuf Wrapped, Project for Paris
1975-1985
Polyamide fabric and rope
Foto: Wolfgang Volz

For the Christos, winning approval was an uphill battle that took ten years. They began, as so often, democratically with the people who lived in the immediate neighborhood, talking to them, persuading them. And their campaign continued all the way to the French President and the Mayor of Paris, both of whom had to give their approval before the project could finally proceed.

The Pont Neuf Wrapped, Project for Paris
September 17th
Foto: Wolfgang Volz

At long last, permission was given by Mayor Jacques Chirac, the former premier with presidential ambitions, and by his arch rival, President François Mitterand. After blocking the Rue Visconti with oil barrels, the Christos had repeatedly tried to embark on Parisian projects, but to no avail. Wrapping the Pont-Neuf which proved a triumphant success in the event was a gesture, the symbolic repayment of a debt that Christo felt he owed to France, his first true home after his escape from behind the Iron Curtain. The bridge arguably symbolized (among other things) his own crossing from the Communist to the Free World, and his new-found freedom to express himself in art.

The Pont Neuf Wrapped, Project for Paris
During installation
Foto: Wolfgang Volz

On September 22, 1985, a group of 300 professional workers completed the temporary work of art The Pont Neuf Wrapped (1975-1985). They had used nearly 41,000 square meters of woven polyamide fabric, silky in appearance and the color of golden sandstone, and with it they had covered the sides and vaults of the Pont-Neuf's twelve arches (without obstructing river traffic); the parapets to ground level; the sidewalks and curbs (pedestrians walked on the fabric); all the street lamps on both sides of the bridge; the vertical part of the embankment on the western tip of the Ile de la Cit‚; and the esplanade of the Vert-Galant. The fabric was restrained by 13,076 meters of rope and secured with over twelve tons of steel chains encircling the base of each tower.

The Charpentiers de Paris, headed by G‚rard Moulin, with a team of French sub-contractors, were assisted by the team of engineers (Vah‚ Aprahamian, August L. Huber, James Fuller, John Thompson and Dimiter Zagoroff) who have worked on a number of the Christos' projects, under the direction of Theodore Dougherty. Project director Johannes Schaub had submitted detailed plans and a work method description, which had been approved by the Parisian and state authorities.

The Pont Neuf Wrapped, Project for Paris
1975-1985
Foto: Wolfgang Volz

And the result? All the detail of the bridge had become invisible as if (wrote Werner Spies) it had been designed by Adolf Loos, who declared that all ornamentation is a crime. The visual impression made by the wrapped bridge was one of post-modern, aerodynamic architecture that preserved one or two anachronistically medieval features. Those who asked after the point of the enterprise were well answered by one of the Chamonix mountaineers who had been engaged in binding up the vertical walls, and who observed that he really had no idea why he scaled the summits of mountains, either. The thing must be its own vindication: it is done because it is possible to do it. That bridges have always stood for the transitory and passing in life, and for the perilous crossing of the abyss, is a symbolic meaning that will appeal to some, perhaps in the same way as the statistics appeal to others; but the Christos' work, making its most complete and memorable impact on site, to those who travel to see it, tends to insist on its own simplicity, despite the complexity of the operations involved. After the completion of wrapping the bridge, even those who first opposed it were astonished and impressed by the great artistic beauty of the project.

The Pont Neuf Wrapped, Project for Paris
Scale model (detail) 1985
Wood, plexiglass, fabric and twine
82 x 611 x 478 cm
New York, Collection Jeanne-Claude Christo
Foto: Wolfgang Volz

Discussing his work with Masahiko Yanagi for an exhibition catalog of his work (Annely Juda Gallery, London, 1988), Christo said: I see my projects as having two major periods or steps. One I like to think of as the `software period' and the other as the `hardware period'. The software period is when the project is in my drawings, propositions, scale models, legal applications, and technical data. That software period is the more invisible because there are only projections of how the bridge will look. This is different from an architect or a bridge builder, for example, who can refer to previous skyscrapers or previous bridges, and they can make their work look about the same. But because we had never wrapped a bridge, each proposition is unique, even for us [...] Really how the bridge would look at the end was not defined in 1975 when I had the idea [...] The realized work of art, The Pont Neuf Wrapped, is the accumulation of the anticipation and the expectation of a variety of forces: formal, visual, symbolic, political, social, and historical. This is why when we arrive at the hardware period the second part the physical making of the work is probably the most enjoyable and rewarding because it is the crowning of many years of expectation. The hardware period is very much like a mirror, showing what we have worked at. The final object is really the ending of that dynamic idea about the work. In this account, Christo spells out an underlying appeal present throughout their work, an appeal to our love of contingency and flux and of gradual evolution.

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© 1995 by Christo & Taschen Verlag