One of the world’s most impressive monuments, The Arc de Triomphe, is to be wrapped in silver-blue fabric and red rope in a tribute to the late artist Christo, who dreamed of the project for 60 years.
The Bulgarian-born artist was known for producing large-scale public art installations with his wife Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009. The two are most recognized for monumental projects that involved covering historic landmarks in various materials like fabric and plastic. It is the first major Christo project realized since his death in 2020.
The plan for the project L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped was put forward in 1962 and was revived during a 2017 Christo exhibition. The same year, Paris city officials and the Centre des monuments nationaux, which oversees public monuments, approved the proposal for the project. The €14 million ($16.9 million) needed to realize the work has been raised through sales of the duo’s personal archive of studies and prints.
The project included wrapping the Champs-Élysées landmark with 25,000 square meters of metallic blue polypropylene fabric using 3,000 meters of red rope. Construction is set to begin after the French holiday on July 14. It will take 12 weeks for a crew working 24 hours a day to complete it by September 18. The city will begin to deinstall the piece on October 3, in the run-up to Paris’s Armistice Day ceremonies.
L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped is not the biggest Christo piece ever created, though it is certainly among his most ambitious works. Christo also wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin in the mid-1990s and Paris’s Pont Neuf bridge in 1985 with the help of his wife Jeanne Claude. In 2018, Christo created the London Mastaba, a pyramid-like structure comprising 7,500 oil barrels that were set afloat in London’s Hyde Park Serpentine lake.
After an initial delay following concerns among activists that the work would displace birds that nest on the monument, L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped was scheduled to be installed last year, to coincide with a Christo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. The work was then postponed because of the pandemic.
Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, said in a statement, “More than a year after Christo’s death, Paris is continuing the work of this great artist. It is an opportunity to say ‘thank you’ to him and to defend our attachment to contemporary creation.”