This work is an exceptionally rare surviving New York City subway banner created for Christo and Jeanne-Claude's public art. project The Gates (Central Park, 2005) - one of the most written about public art projects ever. It's MTA branded with the now-obsolete MTA metrocard and text. It is UNIQUELY hand signed by Christo - which is irreproducible, in an inherently unrepeatable format.
Installed briefly across the MTA subway system and intended as ephemeral civic advertising, these banners were never commercially distributed and were largely discarded after the project's conclusion. This example was preserved and hand signed by Christo, transforming a transient piece of urban infrastrcture into a unique historical artifact. To our knowledge, no other hand signed example of this subway banner has ever appeared on the market. The work occupies a unique position between: public art documentation, New York cultural history, and Christo's institutional legacy. It is a one-of-a-kind relic from one of the most celebrated public art interventions of the 21st Century:
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
The Gates, original oversized Manhattan Subway Banner (uniquely hand signed by Christo), 2005
Offset lithograph banner (uniquely hand signed on the front by Christo)
This work is elegantly framed in a museum quality wood frame under UV plexiglass.
Measurements:
15 inches vertical by 74 inches horizontal by 2 inches
11 inches x 69 1/2 inches
An extraordinary piece that, when hand signed by Christo, as the present work, nobody you know will have; this was the property of the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) designated exclusively for the subways, so it was never marketed or made available to the general public. We were able to snag one - and we got Christo to sign it. We've never seen another hand signed anywhere else on the market or in the world.
Few things are more quintessentially New York than the subway, and this banner, nearly 70 inches wide (almost six feet!) was one of the original advertisements published by the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) to be plastered across New York City trains to advertise Christo's and Jeanne Claude's iconic exhibition "The Gates". It was not long after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the city was still reeling, and tourists were reluctant to return to the city. Then the new art collecting mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, who, coincidentally, happened to be friends with the artists Christo and Jeanne Claude, revived a long dormant proposal to install saffron gates throughout Central Park - a brilliant idea which drew millions of tourists to New York City and uplifted the mood of the city and the country.
The present oversized subway advertisement was published by the MTA for Christo's exhibition "The Gates: Central Park, NYC" from February 12-27, 2005. The image is CHRISTO: THE GATES, PROJECT FOR CENTRAL PARK, NEW YORK CITY.
Drawing 2002 In two parts: 15 × 96" and 42 × 96" (DETAIL) It was designed expressly to fit into the subways as a large advertisement banner.
We have never seen any of these anywhere in the world that is also hand signed by Christo, and where the signature is so well provenanced. The poster, of course, was plastered all across NYC subways, and was never signed. Exceptionally, we had the ingenuity to ask Christo to sign it which he graciously did. Good luck finding another like this one.
This is an extraordinary piece of New York history and art historical memorabilia. The poster is special enough; but after we acquired it, we personally got Christo to sign it for us -- he himself was impressed, heart warmed to see it and thrilled to sign it -- and the following official book signing on April 1st, 2015 at 192 Books in Manhattan. (see below)
CORY REYNOLDS DATE 3/27/2015
Christo and Jeanne-Claude: In/Out Studio Launch at 192 Books
Edited and with text by Matthias Koddenberg, art historian and close friend of the artists, Christo and Jeanne-Claude: In/Out Studio is a remarkable book, a perfect combination of archival photographs, behind-the-scene views, drawings, collages, objects and an abundance of images that have never been published before, including unknown, lost, destroyed and early works, alongside the iconic monumental works for which they are best known. On Wednesday, April 1 at 7PM Christo will speak and sign copies of the book at 192 Books in Chelsea (192 10th Ave at 21st St). Images below are reproduced from the book.
More information about THE GATES, from Christo
Jeanne Claude's website:
The installation in Central Park was completed with the blooming of the 7,503 fabric panels on February 12, 2005. The 7,503 gates were 4.87 meters (16 feet) tall and varied in width from 1.68 to 5.48 meters (5 feet 6 inches to 18 feet) according to the 25 different widths of walkways, on 37 kilometers (23 miles) of walkways in Central Park. Free hanging saffron colored fabric panels, suspended from the horizontal top part of the gates, came down to approximately 2.1 meters (7 feet) above the ground. The gates were spaced at 3.65 meter (12 foot) intervals, except where low branches extended above the walkways. The gates and the fabric panels could be seen from far away through the leafless branches of the trees. The work of art remained for 16 days, then the gates were removed and the materials recycled.
The 12.7 cm (5 inch) square vertical and horizontal poles were extruded in 96.5 km (60 miles) of saffron colored vinyl. The vertical poles were secured by 15,006 narrow steel base footings, 278 to 380 kilograms (613 to 837 pounds) each, positioned on the paved surfaces. No holes were made in the ground. The gates' components were fabricated, off-site, by seven manufacturers located on the East Coast of the USA. The weaving and sewing of the fabric panels was done in Germany.
In teams of eight, 600 workers wearing "The Gates" uniforms, were responsible for installing 100 gates per team. The monitoring and removal teams included an additional 300 uniformed workers. The monitors assisted the public and gave information. All workers were financially compensated and received breakfast and one hot meal a day. Professional security worked in the park after dark.
The Gates was entirely financed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, as they have done for all their previous projects. The artists did not accept sponsorship or donations.
The grid pattern of the city blocks surrounding Central Park was reflected in the rectangular structure of the commanding saffron colored poles while the serpentine design of the walkways and the organic forms of the bare branches of the trees were mirrored in the continuously changing rounded and sensual movements of the free flowing fabric panels in the wind.
The people of New York continued to use the park as usual. For those who walked through The Gates, following the walkways, the saffron colored fabric was a golden ceiling creating warm shadows. When seen from the buildings surrounding Central Park, The Gates seemed like
Christo Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon were both born in 1935, he in Gabrova, Bulgaria, and she in Casablanca, Morocco. (They would drop their surnames early on.) Christo studied at the Fine Arts Academy in Sofia (1953–56) before defecting to the West, via Prague, in 1957. That year, he spent one semester at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna. He moved to Paris in 1958 and met Jeanne-Claude, who had earned her baccalaureate in Latin and philosophy from the University of Tunis in 1952. They would later marry.
Indebted to Vladimir Tatlin's Constructivist edict "real materials in real space," Christo's first artworks, dating from 1958, consist of appropriated everyday objects such as bottles, cans, furniture, and oil drums wrapped in canvas, bundled in twine, and occasionally overlaid with automobile paint. His first solo exhibition, at Galerie Haro Lauhus in Cologne in June 1961, included his inaugural collaboration with Jeanne-Claude (though she would not publicly acknowledge her role in their creations until 1994), Dockside Packages, a collection of draped oil barrels and rolls of industrial paper arranged outside the gallery along a dock. That same year, the couple made their first attempt at exploring their aesthetic vocabulary on a monumental scale with Project for a Wrapped Public Building, in which they proposed shrouding an unspecified parliamentary edifice, the quintessential symbol of public architecture, in fabric tied down with metal cables. Never realized, the project exists in the form of a photographic collage with an explanatory text by the artists.
Throughout the 1960s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude outlined proposals for similar projects, often involving iconic buildings, like the École Militaire station of the Paris Métro (1961). They saw their dreams come to fruition in the summer of 1968, when they received permission to carry out three of their undertakings: Wrapped Fountain, Piazza Mercato, Spoleto, Italy, 1968; Wrapped Medieval Tower, Spoleto, Italy, 1968; and Wrapped Kunsthalle, Bern, Switzerland, 1968. The following year, they cloaked both the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and a mile-long section of the Australian coastline at Little Bay, north of Sydney. Covered with vast quantities of light-colored fabric, battened down using elaborate systems of cables, ropes, and knots, these architectural and natural forms were defamiliarized, transformed into ghostly presences that momentarily disrupted their surroundings.
Beginning in 1970, the artists executed numerous other projects, all of which became icons of environmental art: Valley Curtain, Grand Hogback, Rifle, Colorado, 1970–72, a curtain of orange nylon suspended across a valley; Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972–76, more than twenty-four miles of white nylon fabric snaking across the countryside; Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida, 1980–83, around six and a half million square feet of bright pink fabric floating around eleven islands; The Pont Neuf Wrapped, Paris, 1975–85, honey-hued fabric shrouding the city’s oldest bridge; The Umbrellas, Japan–USA, 1984–91, a scattering of 3,100 blue and yellow umbrellas in the valleys around Ibaraki prefecture, Japan, and Tejon Pass, California; Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1971–95, the celebrated German government building swathed in silver fabric; and The Gates, Central Park, New York City, 1979–2005, more than 7,500 metal frames fitted with saffron fabric panels and arranged along some twenty-three miles of walkway in Central Park. Due to the staggering cost and increasing complexity of these ventures, in terms of technical know-how as well as the administrative and environmental hurdles the artists were obligated to surmount, realization often took years, even decades. Unrealized projects, still considered ongoing, include The Mastaba, a plan for a monumental edifice of stacked oil barrels intended for a desert location in the United Arab Emirates, and Over the River, which would feature intermittent extensive canopies of fabric suspended above a 5.9-mile stretch of the Arkansas River.
In his solo work, Christo continues to conceive projects, some existing on paper only, in which found objects—from magazines, newspapers, and street signs, to nude female models, telephones, computers, and automobiles—are wrapped in fabric or plastic and then twined. These assemblages embody many of the themes Christo and Jeanne-Claude explored in their artistic partnership, among them the opposition between the familiar and the uncanny, the veiled and the exposed, the built and the natural environments, utility and futility, permanence and ephemerality.
Major exhibitions of the artists' work have been organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (1979), Museum Ludwig in Cologne (1981), Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (1990), Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin (2001), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2004). Jeanne-Claude died in 2009; Christo lives and works in New York City.
