Wrapped Arc de Triomphe Is Christo’s Fleeting Gift to Paris

Planned by the conceptual artist 60 years ago, the posthumous work transforms a great monument with a glistening cloak. It feels like a liberating moment for the city.

PARIS — For almost 60 years, the artist known as Christo dreamed of wrapping the Arc de Triomphe. As a young man, having fled communist Bulgaria, he would gaze at the monument from his tiny garret apartment. A photomontage dated 1962 shows the 164-foot-high arch crudely bundled up. Freedom trumped the sacred. He always wanted people to look again at what perhaps they did not see.

Now, a little over a year after Christo’s death at the age of 84, “L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped” is a reality. Some 270,000 square feet of silvery blue fabric, shimmering in the changing light of Paris, hugs the monument commissioned by Napoleon in 1806 at the giddy height of his power. The polypropylene material, its tone reminiscent of the city’s distinctive zinc roofs, is secured but not held rigidly fast by almost 1.9 miles of red rope, in line with the artist’s meticulous instructions.

“He wanted a living object that, with its moving folds, would turn the monument’s surface into something sensual,” Vladimir Yavachev, Christo’s nephew and the project director, told me. Suddenly, at the top of the Champs Élysées, a magical pale object beckons, its glistening lightness anchored by steel slabs weighing 150 tons. The effect is at once disorienting and riveting.