We begin Monday with sad news. Christo Vladimirov Yavashev , a visual artist of Bulgarian origin, has died at the age of 84. He became famous for wrapping famous buildings, including the Pont Neuf in Paris, the Reichstag in Berlin or for setting up a 200-foot curtain in a gorge in Colorado. The artist died yesterday in New York.
Christo was born on June 13, 1935 in Gabrovo. From there he went to Prague, from where he escaped to Vienna. There he studied for one semester at the Academy of Fine Arts. Finally, a year later, he came to Paris, where he met his later wife Jeanne-Claude, with whom he also had a professional relationship. In 1964, the couple moved permanently to New York.
The artist was known for his monumental works requiring many years of preparation and a huge amount of money. All of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's monumental works were temporary - some of them existed for only a few dozen hours. They were dismantled in various ways - by the artists themselves, by people visiting them or by forces of nature. Christo, meanwhile, painted paintings that allowed him to support himself. It is estimated that he sold them for more than $66 million.
One famous work is the so-called Running Fance created 1972 in California. The installation consisted of a strip of fabric nearly 18 feet high and 25 miles long, which would crisscross Sonoma and Marin counties. The structure consisted of 2 million square feet of fabric and was suspended from 2,000 poles. It survived for only two weeks.
Between 2014and 2016, Christo and Jeanne-Claudecreated "The Floating Piers ," a three-mile-long bridge on Lake Iseo near Milan that connected two Italian towns to the small island of San Paolo. The footbridge was 16 meters wide and made of polyethylene and orange fabric. It was visited by thousands of people.
