CHRISTO: OBITUARY

Christo (Christo Vladimirov Javachef): Obituary

This is a summary of the obituary of Christo Vladimirov Javachef – known as Christo - which was published in The Guardian newspaper on 2^nd June 2020.  The author is Charles Darwent.

Christo

Christo Vladimirov Javachef was born in Gabrovo, in the Bulgarian Balkans in 1935.  His mother was a secretary at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia; his father was a chemist who ran a state fabric factory.  ‘Their milieu was as progressive as the hardline communism of the Peoples’ Republic of Bulgaria allowed’.

From the age of 17, for four years, Christo studied at the academy where his mother worked: ‘he was an ardent exponent of Soviet socialist realism’.  In 1956 Christo moved to Prague to study theatre design and he ‘at last encountered European modernism’.  Christo subsequently moved, via Vienna, to Paris, and in the process became stateless.  There, Christo married Jeanne-Claude Planchon, ‘the daughter of an aristocratic French general’, and, together with their son Cyril they moved to New York in 1964 as illegal immigrants.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude worked together on the many large scale artworks which became their life’s work.  Darwent writes: ‘In the more than five decades of their collaboration they would complete 22 projects; rather more – 37 – were still unrealised at the time of Jeanne-Claude’s sudden death at the age of 74’.  ‘After 1994, their projects were signed “Christo and Jeanne-Claude”, and their earlier works retroactively catalogued as such’.

The wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin was prompted in 1971 by the receipt of a postcard from a friend in Berlin.  Christo’s request to wrap the building was turned down by the Bundestag in 1977, 1981 and 1987.  Approval was granted in 1994.  Darwent writes that Christo said that ‘the Reichstag was the only structure in a still-divided Berlin “that was under the jurisdiction of the Americans, the Soviets, the English, the French and the two Germanys”.  Like the artist himself, it sat on a no-man’s land between warring political systems.  “To me, as a Bulgarian refugee who fled communism, east-west relations are important” he said’.

Darwent writes: ‘At dawn on 24 June 1995, 90 professional rock climbers abseiled from the roof of the Reichstag unfurling 100,000 square metres of aluminised fabric as they went.  At a stroke, the hulk built under Wilhelm I was transformed into a piece of classical sculpture.  The point of this aesthetic reinvention was to put the building back into public ownership.  The wrapping of the Reichstag had only been made possible by the support of the people.  The Reichstag was owned not by (the then Chancellor) Kohl, but by “the German nation, by 80 million Germans”’.’

For all their works, Christo and Jeanne-Claude refused any sponsorship.  All their works were ‘too big to fit in a gallery, too expensive to own’. 

Christo Vladimirov Javachef died on 31^st May 2020 at the age of 84.

RICHARD ANUSZKIEWICZ: OBITUARY

RICHARD  ANUSZKIEWICZ:  OBITUARY

Richard Anuszkiewicz: Obituary

This is a summary of the obituary of Richard Anuszkiewicz which was published in The Guardian newspaper on 30^th May 2020.  The author is Charles Darwent.

Richard Anuszkiewicz

Richard Anuszkiewicz was born 23^rd May 1930.  He grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, near to his contemporary Andy Warhol.  Like Warhol’s family, Richard Anuszkiewicz’s family ‘was working class, religious and came from Mitteleuropa’.   In 1947 Richard Anuszkiewicz won a National Scholastic Art award, and in the next year a full scholarship to the Institute of Art in Cleveland, Ohio.  He graduated from here in 1953 with a BA in Fine Arts.  Richard Anuszkiewicz then obtained a Master’s at Yale.

At Yale, Anuszkiewicz began painting seriously, and, as he put it ‘non-objectively’.  His chief tutor was Josef Albers, formerly of the Bauhaus.  After Yale, Anuszkiewicz, studied 1955-56 for a teaching degree at Kent State University, Ohio. 

In 1957 Anuszkiewicz moved ‘to a New York still in thrall to the abstract expressionists’.  In 1960 Anuszkiewicz was offered a show at the Contemporaries gallery on Madison Avenue.  After Alfred Barr – Director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) – bought one of Anuszkiewicz’s works – Fluorescent Complement (1960) – the show became ‘an overnight success’. 

Fluorescent Complement (1960) is a work in which yellow/green discs of colour float on a background which is blue, but with a white central area.  The yellow/green discs move disconcertingly on the blue background, and in the white centre the yellow/green discs appear to erupt towards the viewer. 

‘By 1961 there was a waiting list for his eye-popping pictures’.  A MoMA exhibition in 1965 – The Responsive Eye – brought Anuszkiewicz’s work to a wider audience.  This exhibition ‘would define what had lately been dubbed op (optical) art'.  Anuszkiewicz and the British painter Bridget Riley were ‘the stars of the show’.  This 1965 exhibition was ‘the high point of his career’.  Darwent writes how Anuszkiewicz’s works were ‘hard to live with’: space and colour move constantly and ‘trip each other up’ with no resolution.

In the next two decades, Anuszkiewicz moved on to more mathematical works.  A number of exhibitions of Anuszkiewicz’s works were held in the years since 2013.  Unlike Riley, there was no resurgence of interest in Anuszkiewicz, but this did not seem to concern him. 

Richard Anuszkiewicz died on 19^th May 2020 at the age of 89.