Oil barrels proved to be suitable working material for Christo because of their sculptural effect and their low cost, and they soon became a dominant factor in his work. From 1958 onwards, many structures were created out of wrapped and unwrapped barrels. Whereas the wrapped cans and bottles were comparable to classical still lifes, the dimensions of the columns of barrels gave them a life-sized form. Their large size, coupled with their arrangement in groups, enhanced their physical effect over that of the smaller works.

The use of oil barrels in Christo’s work is clearly manifested for the first time in a column that he erected in the courtyard behind his studio at 14 rue de Saint-Senoch in 1958. Christo carried the barrels he had collected and cleansed into the yard, stacked them one upon the other, had them photographed and then finally disassembled them. In 1960, his friend, artist Jan Voss, seeing that Christo’s Paris studio was bursting at the seams, offered him additional storage space in his studio in Gentilly. By fate or coincidence, the studio was located next to a huge yard used for storing oil drums that Christo would be able to use. The new, open space had an immediate effect on Christo’s works, most notably in their dimensions. He carried the principle of vertical stratification to monumental heights by stacking several barrels up to a height of fifteen feet along the freeway in Gentilly.

The first time Christo had the opportunity to present his new structures to the larger public was at his solo exhibition in the Cologne gallery of Haro Lauhus in 1961. The visitors were welcomed in front of the entrance by a column of stacked barrels, and inside, Christo carried this motif to claustrophobic heights by filling a whole room with his barrel arrangements. The columns and towers of rusty steel drums reached to the ceiling and left only a small passage for the visitors to get to the back room of the gallery, where a Wall of Oil Barrels was installed. The bottoms and lids, structured from brown and red to white and gray, must have seemed like an extreme enlargement of a pointillist painting.

While barrel columns were prevalent before 1967, from the late 1960s two basic forms dominate all of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s barrel projects: the wall and the mastaba. In Paris in 1962, Christo and Jeanne-Claude completed Wall of Oil Barrels – The Iron Curtain, which closed the rue Visconti with a wall of 89 oil barrels. In 1967, Christo and Jeanne-Claude proposed to close the Suez Canal with a Ten Million Oil Barrels Wall. In 1968, they proposed to close New York’s 53rd Street with a Wall of Oil Barrels. These proposals can be seen as forerunners of such projects as the Valley Curtain or the Running Fence. In 1999, Christo and Jeanne-Claude realized The Wall, an installation made of 13,000 oil barrels inside the Gasometer Oberhausen, Germany.

The mastabas originated in the way in which barrels are often stacked. A mastaba (from the Arabic word meaning "bench") is a forerunner of the pyramids and is a flat-roofed, rectangular structure with outward sloping sides. Christo and Jeanne-Claude realized their first mastaba-shaped structure at Cologne Harbor in 1961 (Stacked Oil Barrels and Dockside Packages). In 1968, they realized a 1,240 Oil Barrels Mastaba at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Currently, Christo is working to be granted permission to realize The Mastaba, a project for the United Arab Emirates.

Excerpt from the book Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Early Works 1958-64 by Matthias Koddenberg (Bönen: Kettler, 2009). Edited by the author in 2011.

Virtual Tour

Click here to take a Virtual Tour of the exhibition Early Works 1958-69 on view at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany, 2001. To return, click on the signature on top of the page.