Amazon.com Review
The artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have famously tied up Berlin's Reichstag with miles of silvery fabric, wrapped the Pont Neuf in Paris, and circled the islands in Biscayne Bay with flamingo pink fabric. Each project may only be on view a short time, but each is the result of years of planning, scouting, wrangling with local permitting agencies, and documenting the whole process. The sale of drawings and notes finances the enterprise.
The Umbrellas: Japan-USA contains two volumes of documentation for a project to install and then open 3,100 umbrellas (nearly 20 feet high and over 28 feet wide when unfurled) in two countries in the fall of 1991. Volume one is filled with maps, sketches, diagrams of the specially designed umbrellas, and black-and-white photographs of the artists on location meeting with officials and landowners whose property would be used for the installation. In volume two, the project comes to gorgeous fruition. Hundreds of color photographs of azure blue umbrellas in Japan and sunflower yellow ones in California fill the book. (Full-page swatches of the actual fabric show the intensity of the colors.) We begin to understand the monumental scope of the project in photographs taken from all angles: aerial shots with a long view, views from underneath, forests of umbrellas in rice paddies and running for miles along the California highway. Only 2,500 copies of this special collector's edition exist, each signed and numbered by the artists.
Product Description
"Who's gonna stop the rain from complaining...?" lyricist Hal David asked. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Umbrella Project in 1991 was the most ambitious and expensive project they have ever undertaken.
1340 blue six-metre umbrellas were assembled and erected throughout a narrow valley in rural Japan. 7000 yellow umbrellas were similarly prepared across the Pacific in a dry expanse of Californian land. After months of gruelling process, the two countries united as the forest of umbrellas were opened simultaneously on both continents. The blue symbolised the plentitude of water in the Japanese terrain, and the yellow represented the heat of the American valley. For Christo the umbrellas were "freestanding, dynamic modules... which reflected the availability of the land in each valley, creating an invitational, inner space."
The umbrellas were removed after two weeks, but the memories of this unrepeatable and transient endeavour have now been collected in this official book of documentation designed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Thousands of photographs, plans, sketches, notes and a retrospective text provide the core source material, covering every stage of the project from inception to aftermath. A very special edition indeed.
