(born in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, in 1935; 2020 New York)
STORE FRONT (Project) Store Front (Mandarin yellow from “Red Devil” enamel), 1965, titled, signed, dated Christo 1965 and inscribed 99” x 87” 1/2 x 20”, collage, technique: enamel paint, charcoal, pencil, vellum on light card, with staple clamps on cardboard, mounted with nails on wooden plate, 71 x 56.5 cm, in plexiglass box

We are grateful to the Christo and Jeanne Claude Archive, New York, for their kind assistance in cataloguing this work.

Provenance:
Miles and Shirley Fiterman Collection, Minneapolis (purchased from Christo and Jeanne-Claude)
Philipps London, 28.6.2019, Lot 127
Private Collection, Germany

The Store Front Project is one of a series of projects that Christo and Jeanne-Claude began in Paris in the early sixties. Christo bought small glass display cabinets, metal cabinets and medicine cabinets at flea markets in Paris, which he converted into his show cases. With some of them, he reversed their function by gluing fabric or wrapping paper on the inside of the glass panes, whereas he fitted the closed metal cabinets with a light bulb and covered their rusty floors with precious fabrics such as satin and silk.
After emigrating to New York in 1964, Christo changed the dimensions of his show cases. He now took metal frameworks from old shop windows found on scrap yards and in condemned buildings and began to modulate them in a similar way he did before with the small show cases. The Store Front Project was created by taking the gigantic dimensions of New York’s architecture into account. The Store Fronts consist of architectural elements, with historicising ornaments, numerous signs of usage, and old patina. They are also covered with fabric and wrapping paper, which makes the doors appear to be firmly closed shut. During the course of 1965 Christo changed the design of his store fronts, as the charm of the handcrafted old shop window fronts of old New York gave way to industrially cold, polished metal surfaces.
As for all of his projects, Christo also made very exact preliminary drawings and sketches for the Store Front Project, which he coloured with warm-toned enamel paint, as he used for the following three-dimensional works. The construction drawing, in which the load-bearing elements of the construction are emphasised in yellow and red, makes it particularly clear to the viewer that Christo is not concerned with concealing the store fronts. Instead, he attaches importance to emphasising the external structures in these projects. The drawing is executed as a construction drawing on thin transparent paper, exactly dimensioned and provided with notes on the colours in the lower part of the sheet.
With the Store Front Project, Christo and Jeanne-Claude began changing entire rooms and environments in 1964 - the Landart projects were born. The Store Front Project already contains the elements that play a central role in all of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s further work and will be developed more in each of the following major projects. The metal external structures in strong colours, as well as the fabrics and wrapping paper on the inside of the windows and doors are forerunners of projects such as Valley Curtain, Running Fence or The Gates.