Unequivocally and quintessentially Christo, the present work, executed in 1979, is a blueprint proposal for artist’s infamous The Pont Neuf Wrapped; a monumental and divine disruption of the topography of Paris in 1985. Divorced from the restrictive and physically limiting confines of the gallery and museum, works by Christo were contingent on site and intimately tied to their immediate and local context, developing a dialogue with real space and its surrounding community. Consisting of a black and white aerial photograph, an ordinance map, an illustration of the wrapped bridge, alongside the artist’s notes and measurements, the present work is much more than a preparatory study. Indeed, Christo commented: “‘as with all my previous projects, all the expenses related to The Pont Neuf are borne by me, through the sale of my original preparation drawings and collages, as well as my earlier works” (Christo cited in: Exh. Cat., Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Christo, from Lilja collects ion, July - September 1989, p. 160).

On September 22^nd 1985, some 300 professional workers completed the temporary site-specific artwork, which consisted of 41,800 square metres of woven polyamide fabric. Silky in appearance and golden sandstone in colour, the material covered the sides and vaults of twelve arches, the parapets, the pavements and curbs (in which pedestrians walked on the fabric), all street lamps on both sides of the bridge, as well as the vertical part of the embankment and the Esplanade of the Vert-Galant. Mammoth in both scale and undertaking, ropes held down the fabric to the bridge's surface and maintained the principal shapes, accentuating relief while emphasising proportions and details of the Pont-Neuf, which had now joined the left and right banks and the Île de la Cité, the heart of Paris, for over 400 years. Begun under Henri III and completed during the reign of Henry IV in 1606, according to Christo no other bridge in Paris offers such structural and visual variety.

Much like the present work, Johannes Schaub, the project's director, had submitted The Pont Neuf Wrapped method and detailed plans, and received approval from the authorities of the City of Paris, the Department of the Seine and the State. A global workforce, French sub-contractors, were assisted by the engineers from the United States, who had worked on Christo and Jeanne-Claude's previous projects, under the direction of Theodore Dougherty: Vahé Aprahamian, August L. Huber, James Fuller, John Thomson and Dimiter Zagoroff. Whilst the bridge was wrapped, 600 monitors in crews of 40 worked around the clock to maintain the project, collating data and information throughout the duration of the thought-provoking intervention, until the removal of the project on October 7th.

Christo’s site-oriented work highlights a shift in the responsibility of the artwork and its artist, defining a practice that is inherently social or alludes to social issues. Curator and Art Historian Miwon Kwon articulates three paradigms of site-specificity, “phenomenological, social/institutional, and discursive,” outlining that such categorisations exist as competing definitions, continually overlapping while operating simultaneously (Miwon Kwon, Ed., One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity, Massachusetts 2004, p. 30). Kwon further comments, ‘the site is now structured (inter)textually rather than spatially, and its model is not a map but an itinerary, a fragmentary sequence of events and actions through space’ (Ibid, p. 24). Indeed, wrapping the Pont-Neuf continued this tradition of successive metamorphoses by a new sculptural dimension and transformed it, for 14 days, into a colossal work of art.