[imagesource: Reuters]

The Arc de Triomphe has always been iconic but people are really talking about it now.

After three months of construction work, 90 climbers, and 25 000 square metres of silvery-blue fabric, Paris’ most famous war memorial has been transformed into a new art piece.

The 160-foot-tall monument is completely wrapped, thanks to the vision of two late artists, Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

The installation project, titled “L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped,” had been Christo’s vision for almost 60 years and has finally come to fruition.

Unfortunately, it is over a year since Christo passed away and more than a decade after Jeanne-Claude’s death, per CNN.

The wrapping was supposed to happen last year but was delayed because of concern over nesting kestrel falcons in the arch, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now that the project has been completed, it will remain up for 16 days:

Before all this, the couple took on other massive projects that saw famous places get a bit of a makeover, all with the goal of being “fleeting, sublime encounter[s] with an environmental artwork that interrupts the experience of the everyday”.

Here’s Christo in his New York studio in 2019 with his design for “L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped”:

The couple has a fascinating history:

The married artists (full names Christo Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon) became internationally renowned for ambitious projects like “The Pont Neuf Wrapped,” revealed in 1985, and “Wrapped Reichstag” in Berlin 10 years later.

They used textiles to transform the natural world, too — everything from an 18 600-square-metre (200 000-square-foot) orange curtain, hung between two mountain slopes in Colorado, to a series of islands near Miami encircled in bubblegum pink fabric.

A series of thousands of saffron-paneled gateways in New York’s Central Park, unveiled in 2005, was the last project they completed together before Jeanne-Claude suffered a fatal brain aneurysm.

Here’s Christo and Jeanne-Claude with the wrapped Pont Neuf in Paris in 1985:

And this is the curtain they hung across the two mountain slopes in Rifle, Colorado:

Christo gave an interview to CNN shortly before his death, admitting that although the only project he would consider in Paris was wrapping the Arc, he never fully believed it would happen:

“I am an artist who is totally irrational, totally irresponsible, completely free,” Christo said. “Nobody needs my projects,” he added. “The world can live without these projects. But I need them and my friends (do).”

Well, the project of wrapping the Arc did take a hell of a lot of effort. More than people would think, according to Vladimir Yavachev, Christo’s nephew and the project’s director of operations who worked with the artist for 30 years.

The wrapping took 12 weeks of nearly 24-hour daily work, with all the workers needing to take the utmost care to protect the monument and all of its ornamentation:

“​​Some of the statues have wings, they have swords, they have trumpets,” [Anne Burghartz, an engineer on the project] said. “So we built these cages around the statues to protect them from the fabric, from the climbers and from the construction site work.”

The project also made use of laser technology and drones and in total cost around €14 million (around R242 million).

[source:cnn]