The Тriumphal arch will be packed according to Christo’s design in July

The 14m-euro installation will make Christo and his wife Jean-Claude’s dream more than 60 years old come true.

The triumphal arch in Paris will be wrapped in silver-blue textile and red rope in a posthumous performance of a project by the artist Christo, created in the early 60s of the last century, the electronic edition of the British Guardian reported, quoted by  Bulgarian News Agency BTA.

Next month, work will begin on the installation “The Arc de Triomphe. Wrapped” on one of the most popular monuments in the world. The cost of the project is 14m euros. The arch will be packed in 25,000 square meters of recyclable polypropylene fabric, fixed with 3,000 meters of red rope, also recyclable.

The installation will fulfill the dream of Christo and his wife Jean-Claude more than 60 years ago, who made the first plans for the project in 1962 in a rented room near the monument.

“We can do this project today because they have already painted every visual and artistic detail of it. It is one hundred percent a project of Christo and Jean-Claude. Their wish was for it to come true, even after he left. We we are just realizing his vision, “the artist’s nephew Vladimir Yavashev told the Guardian.

He explained that Christo and Jean-Claude had a photo montage of what the packaged Arc de Triomphe would look like, but never offered to do the installation because they thought they would not get permission, he added.

The idea was revived in 2017 during an exhibition by Christo and received the approval of the authorities in Paris and the Center for National Monuments.

Jean-Claude died in 2009, and Bulgarian-born Christo died at the age of 84 at the end of May last year.

Life on the run

The story of the Yavashev family is a story of a constant escape. On March 18, 1913, after the assassination of the Greek king in Thessaloniki, Bulgaria found itself at war with Serbia, Montenegro, Turkey, Romania and Greece. The Bulgarians living in Thessaloniki are ousted. The Yavashevs are suspected of complicity in the attack, as Hristo’s grandfather was a wealthy man with a large estate in which artists often gathered. The grandfather was detained, but Hristo’s grandmother and mother managed to escape from Thessaloniki to Bulgaria at the last moment.

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The three brothers in the family are going through the arrest of their father, who was a famous engineer. He became a victim of the purge against the intelligentsia in the country, carried out after the entry in 1944 of the Red Army in Bulgaria. In just four months, 30,000 people were killed in the country for resisting the new communist government. Hristo’s father was thrown into prison, from where he was released years later, but a man collapsed and was completely ruined.

While the father is in prison, Hristo’s mother struggles to survive: according to Anani Yavashev, she was forced to sell even the household goods to provide for her children. “I can’t take it anymore”

It is precisely these moments that are deeply imprinted in the mind of the growing Christ, which later alienates him strongly from his homeland. After graduating from high school, in 1952 he enrolled at the Academy of Arts in Sofia, where he studied until 1956. But this art, directed entirely by the state and showing happy peasants, rich harvests, heads of state, socialist grandeur and superiority, was not the art of Christ. In 1956 he left for Prague, where his uncle lived. There he paints pictures to survive somehow.

In a letter to his brother Anani, he wrote: “I can’t take it anymore. There’s no point in meeting people who haven’t understood me for four years (at the Art Academy in Sofia); selfish people who humiliate me and they imagine that only they understand art. Art that is a base lie and cynical nonsense – this can not be any art at all. I am an artist and I want to make art that in Bulgaria turned out to be impossible. “

The western breeze was felt in Prague, he also wrote to his brother, but Hristo did not stay long in Prague. There he became close to a group of doctors who were also preparing to flee. Together, they bribed a customs officer who hid them in a sealed freight car on a cold January day in 1957. All the while, Hristo was afraid that they would be betrayed and did not rest until they arrived in Vienna. A friend of his father helped him there. This is how Hristo became Christo – a freelance artist.