Forty-one years ago, Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped Paris's oldest bridge in nearly a million square feet of sandstone-gold fabric and watched three million people show up just to see a bridge disappear. This spring a French artist named JR tried to answer that stunt with a fake mountain built out of inflatable canvas, and wind tore it open before a single visitor got inside.
The bridge Christo wrapped once already
Planning for the original wrap started in 1979. Paris mayor Jacques Chirac rejected the project outright in 1982, and it only cleared city hall because an aide slipped the approval into a stack of the mayor's papers that he signed without noticing, in August 1984. A year later, on September 22, 1985, a crew of 300 professional workers finished draping 41,800 square meters of woven polyamide fabric across the Pont Neuf, tied down with 13 kilometers of rope and anchored by 12.1 tons of steel chain sunk a meter underwater, according to the project's record. Christo and Jeanne-Claude paid the estimated $2.5 million bill themselves, funded entirely by selling their own preparatory drawings and models, refusing sponsorship the way they refused it on every project they ever built. The wrap stood for two weeks. Three million people came out to look at a bridge they had walked across their whole lives, now hidden under fabric the color of sandstone.
Who is JR, and why he gets to do this
JR earned the right to attempt this one wall at a time, long before the Pont Neuf. Born in a Paris suburb in 1983, he started pasting portraits of strangers onto buildings with nothing but a camera and a borrowed darkroom. He won the TED Prize in 2011 and used the money to launch Inside Out, a project that has since printed and pasted more than 500,000 people's faces in public across over 150 countries. He made the Louvre's glass pyramid appear to vanish into a crater in 2019, and spent years documenting men inside a maximum-security prison in Tehachapi, California, printing their portraits across the prison yard itself. None of that involved wrapping a bridge. All of it built the same case: that a stranger's face, or a mountain that shouldn't exist, can stop people who were only trying to cross a river.
JR's answer: don't wrap it, grow a cave out of it
For the Pont Neuf's anniversary he skipped photography and built architecture instead. La Caverne du Pont Neuf is an inflatable structure 120 meters long, 20 meters wide, covering 2,400 square meters of ground, standing between 12 and 18 meters tall, printed with a trompe l'oeil skin modeled on the limestone quarries that supplied the stone for half of historic Paris, according to Designboom's coverage of the piece. Visitors weren't meant to just look at it from the riverbank. They were meant to walk through it, crossing the bridge inside a canyon built out of air and printed fabric instead of a Paris landmark. JR built in a soundtrack too: a minimal drone composed by Thomas Bangalter, half of Daft Punk, plus an augmented reality layer built with Snap's Paris AR studio that laid animated traces borrowed from 19th-century chronophotography over the stone.
The wind got there before the public did
Before a single visitor set foot inside, a storm tore through it first. Strong gusts off the Seine ripped the printed envelope at its edges while crews were still finishing the outer skin, tearing the fabric open at the structure's 18-meter summit and damaging three separate sections, according to Dezeen's reporting on the damage. The planned June 6 opening got scrapped on the spot. Euronews reported that crews spent more than a week patching the tears before the piece was safe to open to the public at all. JR didn't try to hide the repair. He left the patches black instead of matching them to the surrounding print, so the scar stayed visible, turning a construction accident into part of the finished work.
What finally opened, and what it felt like
La Caverne du Pont Neuf opened to the public on June 15, free and open around the clock, and ran through June 28, its full length walkable start to finish. Inside, visitors moved from daylight into a darkened tunnel carved through the fabric, then back out into light on the other side, the bridge itself disappearing under a floor-to-ceiling illusion of raw rock, with scent and lighting effects layered on top of the soundtrack, according to Dezeen's look inside the tunnel. Demand ran high enough that visitors were warned to expect lines, and by closing day the installation had drawn comparisons back to the three million who lined up for Christo and Jeanne-Claude four decades earlier, per Sortiraparis's coverage of the closing run. JR has said the goal was never the illusion for its own sake. "Art is a transformation, and a way of renewing the way we look at the world around us," he said of the project, tying it back to the argument Christo and Jeanne-Claude made in 1985: that wrapping a bridge in fabric for two weeks could provoke as much as it delighted.
Christo died in 2020. Jeanne-Claude died in 2009. Neither one lived to see somebody try to answer their bridge. JR's version lasted exactly as long as the original, two weeks, and by the time it came down on June 28 it had already survived the thing that nearly killed it before opening day.
Related reading from TasteBueno
- An Artist Who Drills Faces Into Walls Just Turned a Paris Airport Into 11,000 Tiles of the City Itself
- Paris Covered Its City Hall in a Crying Face Last Year. It Was Shepard Fairey Marking a Climate Deal's Tenth Birthday.
- Berlin's Gardeners Turned a Grey Noise Barrier Into a Street Art Gallery. It Sits a Few Miles From the Wall That Started It All.
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