by Jon Lackman | 20 November 2009 | Contemporary
Artist Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, known as Jeanne-Claude, has died. She was, of course, the longtime collaborator with Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, known as Christo. Of the numerous obituaries that are now appearing, few seem to want to deal with the questions of authorship, individuality, and gender relations that were raised by their collaboration, which have been debated by art historians such as Charles Green:
Beginning in the 1980s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude rigorously and sternly insisted on retrospective joint reattribution of all works from the late 1960s onward … If, in a 1989 interview, Christo seemed to deny this, it seems more likely that he was distinguishing between his authorial name–the name “Christo” for which he had become famous–and the names of the two artists behind that brand name. He said:
[The work] is the idea of one man. I make the point in discussion of my art that I do not do commissions; I decide my projects and how to do them. The projects continually translate this great individualism, this creative freedom.
In 1990 Christo was quoted as saying “the work is a huge, individualistic gesture that is entirely by me.” Although his emphasis on “individuality” seemed to contradict his collaborative working method, by the 1980s the name “Christo” had come, I believe, to denote a corporation, a trademark idea and copyright ownership as well as a single man and even the collaboration between Christo and Jeanne-Claude itself.
