Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Delights, Real and Imagined

BRUSSELS — In 1975, the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude approached the civic authorities in Barcelona, Spain, with a plan to wrap the nearly 200-foot-tall Columbus Monument at the end of La Rambla boulevard. The artists, known for gigantic projects in which large structures are draped in cloth and trussed with rope, had already given their signature treatment to places such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, a Roman-era wall in the Italian capital and a section of the Australian coastline.

“We worked with the mayor,” Christo said in a telephone interview from New York, recalling the proposal in Barcelona. “After two years, he said no. He was assassinated and killed. Not by us, but someone else. In 1981, there was another mayor. He said no. He was almost assassinated, but survived.”

“In 1984, we received a call from another mayor,” Christo added. “He said ‘please come and wrap it.’ We said we didn’t want to do it anymore. We lost the desire. In these projects, nothing is rational. They are whimsical and personal.”
The monumental works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, his wife and artistic partner, who died in 2009, are the subject of an exhibition in the ING Art Center in Brussels called “Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Urban Projects,” which opened last month and runs through February 2018. As well as records and depictions of their large-scale projects, the exhibition includes more than a dozen ideas that were never completed — a tantalizing opportunity to imagine great works of art that never existed.

In addition to about 80 exhibits, there are over 100 photographs on display, mostly taken by the photographer Wolfgang Volz, a frequent collaborator with the artists. Dazzling and illuminated, Mr. Volz’s blown-up images rotate on LED screens, bringing many of the artists’ completed projects to life and transporting visitors to locations like New York; Sydney, Australia; and rural Japan. Included are their most famous works, “Wrapped Reichstag,” realized in Berlin in 1995, and “The Pont Neuf Wrapped,” in which they shrouded Paris’s oldest bridge in silky fabric.