84 Esquire — June 2018
number of his own increasingly valuable works, which he keeps in a stor-
age faciliy in Manhatan and a much larger one in Basel, Switzerland.
He and Jeanne-Claude also devised an unusually innovative financial
model for their work. hey set up CVJ Corporation, a holding company
which creates subsidiary companies for each project, based in the coun-
try in which it is being made. At the same time, they secure a line of
standby credit from a bank, collateralised against their collection of their
own works, which ensures a smooth cash flow while CVJ pays for cur-
rent projects by selling smaller sculptures, sketches, paintings and even
complete exhibitions to private collectors and institutions. (To give an
indication of price, in late April a Christo painting called “Double Shop
Window”, white paint on Plexiglas, a single one in an edition of 65, sold at
auction at Christie’s in Amsterdam for €7,500.
hey have never accepted sponsorship (while the London Mastaba is
up — for an unusually long period of three months — there will be a con-
current exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery about Christo and Jeanne-
Claude’s work with barrels which will be sponsored by Bloomberg
Philanthropies; Christo stresses that the Mastaba on the lake has received
none of that funding), nor charged entry to see their works. It is a model
that, Christo will proudly tell you, has become the subject of a case study
by Harvard Business School, alongside others for Steve Jobs and Bill
Gates. “I’m educated Marxist from communist Bulgaria escaping in 1957
to the west,” he says, “I’m using capitalist system to the very end.”
Likewise, he refuses to acknowledge the political interpretations of his
work. he use of oil barrels, he says, began only because he was atracted
to their cylindrical shape: “I find it very sculptural form”; this despite the
fact that he and Jeanne-Claude once blocked a Parisian street with oil
barrels in protest at the construction of the Berlin Wall. As far as he will
tell you, the conceptual implications of piling up 410,000 of them in
a country that has the seventh-largest oil reserves is neither here nor
there. (In a recent interview, the British artist Cornelia Parker said: “hat’s
what I admire about Christo and Jeanne-Claude, that they wrapped up
the Reichstag and then said it had nothing to do with politics. Although it
obviously had.”)
Nor does he want to give any credence to the idea that he is trying to
build something resembling a tomb, or that there might be some faintly
gothic significance in the fact that it is also one of the last projects that he
and Jeanne-Claude had been working on together, as though it were
a later-day Taj Mahal. “he Mastaba is not a tomb like people saying,” he
says, “it’s a much older name, coming from the first urban civilisation in the
world.” Which is true, although the one he has in mind is much closer to
the dimensions of an Egyptian tomb than it is to a Mesopotamian mud
bench. (He also says, with impish glee, that he has another project in the
works that was conceived with Jeanne-Claude, “but I cannot tell you!”)
Four decades on he is still brimming with enthusiasm about the Abu
Dhabi Mastaba’s potential impact: “a landmark structure”, as he describes
it, “that will be like this incredible Islamic mosaic, you can’t believe it
what it will be. And colour. Beaming with colour. his will not relate to
anything you see in architecture today.” Despite the almost unfathomable
expense, a bill which he will again foot, he says that once it is built he will
give it as a git to the people of Abu Dhabi. “If they like, they will own.”
Also: it will have no meaning. “Nothing is as big that is not building. It is
not anything, it is absolutely sculpture,” he says. “Irrational, totally use-
less, totally unnecessary. his is the most beautiful part.”
There is, of course, the question of whether or not the Abu Dhabi
Mastaba, already continuing without Jeanne-Claude — the pair famously
always flew in separate airplanes so that should one of them die in
a crash, the other could still realise their work — could also go ahead
without Christo. “here are some things that can be done without me. As
you see, Mastaba, many projects can be done without me because they
already designed.” And would he want that to happen? “No, I like to see
it!” he says. “I need to be...” he stops. “I love to be there.”A 2017 collage by Christo, demonstrating the size and scale of The Mastaba
(Project for London, Hyde Park, Serpentine Lake) opening in the UK’s capital in June
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, in 1982, searching the Abu Dhabi desert for locations to site
their grand Mastaba project — expected to be the largest sculpture in the world if built