The couple had tried unsuccessfully for months to get permission, so they just went ahead and took the street. A half-hour later, the wall of barrels stood 14 feet high. More officers arrived, including a police chief. After various stalling tactics, Jeanne-Claude finally played on family connections that won them testy permission to keep the wall -- which they dubbed the ''Iron Curtain" -- up until 1 a.m. and no later.
Forty years hence, what does such a stunt still hold for us?
''Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Würth Museum Collection," at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, begins to reveal an answer. The exhibit, which runs through Dec. 31, imports from the German museum 80 sketches, sculptures, and photographs. Spanning five decades, they range from early wrapped oil cans and road signs to drawings related to ''The Gates," in which several thousand arches hung with orange curtains were spread over the paths of New York's Central Park for two weeks last February.
Christo Javacheff studied art in his native Bulgaria, where assignments included painting Lenin and Stalin on factory walls and advising farmers along the Orient Express railway on how to artfully arrange their machines and materials (even wrapping hay) to impress Western passengers. In 1957, the then-21-year-old artist fled the communist country for Austria and later Paris. There, a portrait commission introduced him to the debutante Jeanne-Claude. Before long, the two became lovers and coconspirators, dreaming up and puzzling out the logistics of their signature grand constructions.
In 2002, when they spoke at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, their public persona was a sort of art-world comedy duo: she a cunning wisecracker, he a bumbling straight man. Beginning in Paris and continuing after the couple settled in New York City in 1964, their art reveals an obsession with the metaphorical Iron Curtain that isolated the communist East of Christo's youth from the capitalist West, where he made his name.
