It’s been more than 40 years since the artist known as Christo wrapped the Pont Neuf in sandstone-hued fabric, kicking off an era of “can you top this?” urban art projects. Now, the beloved bridge, the oldest in Paris, has been wrapped again, this time in acres of fabric that have been inflated to create the illusion of a craggy mountain range rising above its elegant span.
Starting next week, through June 28, visitors will be able to walk across the reimagined Pont Neuf through a cavern in which moody lighting and an ambient soundtrack create an “augmented reality,” according to JR, the semi-incognito French street artist and self-styled disciple of Christo, who is behind the project.
“You’re entering a place where you feel like you’re in a cocoon, like in your mother’s belly,” said JR, who turned up for an interview on an electric bike, clad in his trademark fedora and shades. “It’s fascinating.”
Let the crowds who line up for the cave be the judges of that. (Admission is free.) For JR — who grew up in a Paris suburb, lives in New York City and has cultivated an air of mystery in two decades of creating public-art spectacles from California to Italy — the grand opening will mark the end of a bumpy birth.
On June 2, gusty winds ripped the fabric off the top of the installation, delaying the opening by more than a week while the damage was repaired. It was an echo of another Christo project, the Valley Curtain, which stretched fabric across a mountainous highway in Colorado. Hours after being unfurled in 1972, it was shredded by high winds.
As it happens, blowing air is critical to the make-believe rock formation on the Pont Neuf. JR (the initials are a pseudonym) explained how pumping the fabric full of air allowed him to create a structure that would have been too heavy, too costly and too time-consuming to build if the fabric had been hung on 400 feet of metal scaffolding.
The idea of using air came from Vladimir Yavachev, a nephew of Christo’s and the keeper of the artist’s flame, who worked with his uncle and Christo’s wife, Jeanne-Claude, on many of his famous installations, including “The Gates,” the saffron-colored fabric display in New York City’s Central Park, and the wrapped Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Christo, who died in 2020, had experimented with inflatable models.
Yavachev steered the project to JR as a part of a series of commemorations of Christo’s major works. “For the Pont Neuf,” Yavachev said, “I thought it would be really nice to invite another artist to do his own interpretation.”
Would Christo have liked it? “I wouldn’t want to say,” Yavachev replied. “JR is an artist. The last thing you need to do is interfere with an artist’s idea.”
For JR, however, the project is an unabashed tribute to the artist who all but created the genre of large-scale public art spectacles. The two men crossed paths; JR recalled that Christo once came to one of his shows. He said he particularly admired how Christo, who was born in Bulgaria, badgered municipal authorities, sometimes for many years, to win approval for his installations.
There was little of that struggle to get this project approved, JR acknowledged. Public art displays are no longer subversive. Indeed, after four decades, they are viewed as a surefire way to draw publicity and increase tourism.
Many of the Paris officials who approved “The Cave of Pont Neuf,” as this display is called, remembered Christo’s original with affection, JR said, even if pedestrians sometimes tripped and fell on the fabric that Christo had stretched across the deck of the bridge.
JR mimics Christo in another way. He said he accepted no public money for his displays, financing them with sales of his art and corporate partnerships. In this case, two of the sponsors are Salesforce, the cloud-computing giant, and Bloomberg Connects, which works with museums.
Snap, the American tech company that created Snapchat, devised the “augmented reality” program in its Paris studio. Visitors, equipped with special glasses or using an app on their phones, will be able to see people, animals and other images flickering on the cavern walls.
To compose the soundtrack for the cavern, JR recruited Thomas Bangalter, a French musician and producer who is a former member of Daft Punk, the French house band. There is even an olfactory dimension: The French perfume house Odore Scola developed a scent that it says evokes the natural smell of a cavern.
Although JR is an adroit self-promoter and not opposed to merchandising — assuming it’s done in a classy way — he said he had stopped short of a complementary clothing line. “It’s a piece of art and it cannot be the platform for selling T-shirts,” he said. “You know what I mean?”
But what kind of art is it, exactly? Several of JR’s previous creations — at the Louvre’s pyramid entrance or on the facade of the Paris Opera, for example — were exercises in trompe l’oeil. In Rome and Florence, he appeared to peel the wall off old buildings, suggesting the interiors within.
With the Pont Neuf, he said, the concept is to link past and present. The rocks are meant to represent those that were quarried to build the bridge in 1607. The cave, JR said, evokes primordial fears of darkness but also feelings of shelter and coziness. Then there is the isolation of the digital age, in which, he said, people dwell in their own electronic caves.
“I grew up in concrete; I don’t know caves,” JR said. “But yet there is something that connects me, deep down in my roots, the same way it connects all of us.”
Not everybody is convinced.
“There was a great elegance in the way the Christo couple had dressed the Pont-Neuf some 40 years ago,” Jérôme Godefroy, a retired French broadcaster, posted on social media. “One can hardly say the same of the brutalist ‘grotto’ that the omnipresent JR inflicts on us on the same bridge.”
Among locals and tourists who gathered on the banks of the Seine to gawk at the display before the opening, opinions were divided.
“I find it very original and beautiful,” said Dominique Vendeville, 76, who recalled how Christo’s wrapping had turned the bridge into a kind of living room for the city. “I think this will bring people together like that.”
“It’s original but not beautiful,” sniffed her partner, Laurent de la Chaux, 80.
Vendeville waved away de la Chaux’s criticism. “He’s an old man,” she said with a shrug, “and he’s French.”
