Legendary artist duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude were lauded internationally for their large-scale site-specific installations. Born on the same day in Bulgaria and Morocco the pair met in Paris in the late 1950s. Meticulously planned, often taking years, their earliest installations focused on shop windows – often then produced at scale. The present work is a preparatory study for just such a piece.
Christo’s final project, the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, is due to be completed posthumously in September 2021.

In Christo’s Store Front series the spectator confronts the front of a store, but its windows are empty. The shop does not serve as an outlet as it is void of goods – there is a reversal of expectation. It is certainly not selling products created to entice consumers in the then newly defined consumer society, but rather embodies the loss of the goods: a vacuum is on display and not products to admire and long for. In this respect there is a direct autobiographical reference to Christo’s upbringing in Eastern Europe and his experience of the deprivation of the Soviet Union an immense contrast, with his move to New York, to the excessive consumption in the U.S.A.. As Alloway (op. cit. 1969, p. vii) puts it Christo ‘turns physical space into psychological response’.

Christo first began to explore the theme of the Store Front in his collages of 1963-64, the period to which the present work belongs. The earliest works focused on the front facade of commercial stores and were carefully planned through preparatory pencil drawings before being executed in low relief . They were developed at the same time as Christo’s series of small showcases. In the latter he used brown paper or fabric on the inside of the glass of small vitrines which he found in Paris flea markets. In some he inserted interior lights to pique the viewer’s curiosity about the hidden contents of the cases whilst also drawing attention to their denied function of display. They were small meditations comparable to the artist’s early Wrapped Cans or Packages.
Alloway describes the complex iconography and issues being addressed in the Store Fronts (op. cit. 1969, p. viii):

‘...it is psychologically true that we experience most buildings that are sited directly on the sidewalk mainly in terms of the first storey; the second floor and above are virtually invisible. Hence the store front (or the foyer) is, in itself, the best known, the most public zone of a building; the threshold is the focus of attention. Thus, when Christo seals show windows with sheets or with paper, he cancels the internal space that we anticipate and defines space as what is between us and the glass. The spectator’s investigative, voyeuristic impulse is converted into an experience of himself, as an object in space (...) The responses generated by the screened object or the familiar facade are based on the objective act of making a package or screening a window. The factual basis of such art is neither transcended nor undermined: It is the source of the mystery. Christo is the antagonist of the imaginary.”

In the mid 60s Christo started to develop the theme of 1 or 2 dimensional Shop Fronts and expanded them into life-sized 3 dimensional spaces such as Four Store Fronts, Corner and Three Store Fronts.

Noted for their large-scale, site-specific environmental installations, Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude (1935–2009) often planned their works around large landmarks and wrapped landscape elements in fabric. Projects include the Wrapped Reichstag (1971-1995), The Pont Neuf Wrapped (1975-1985), Running Fence (1972-76) in California, and The Gates (1979-2005) in Central Park, New York.

These projects often took years, sometimes decades of careful preparation whereby Christo created many drawings, collages and models as preparation for and documentation of those ephemeral works. Intended on the one hand to finance the projects, they were also crucial in finding technical and aesthetic solutions, aiding political negotiation, permitting and environmental approval, and assisting with hearings and public persuasion. The pair refused grants, scholarships, donations or public money and instead chose to finance their projects via the sale of these preparatory studies, drawings and paintings.

Born on the same day in Bulgaria and Morocco respectively, the pair met and married in Paris in the late 1950s. Originally working under Christo’s name, they later credited their installations to both ‘Christo and Jeanne-Claude’. After Jeanne-Claude’s death in 2009 and until his own death in 2020, Christo continued to plan and execute projects.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude described the myriad elements that brought the projects to fruition as integral to the artwork itself, and said their projects contained no deeper meaning than their immediate aesthetic impact; their purpose simply for joy, beauty and new ways of seeing the familiar.