Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Valley Curtain (Hand Signed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude), 1972

Christo and Jeanne-Claude

The Valley Curtain (Hand Signed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude), 1972

Offset lithograph poster (Hand Signed)

Hand signed "Christo et Jeanne-Claude" in marker upper right front

Unnumbered

33 × 25 inches

Unframed

The Valley Curtain, Rifle Colorado
Offset lithograph poster
Hand signed "Christo et Jeanne-Claude" in marker upper right front
Provenance: Estate of Aviva and Jacob Bal Teshuva, collectors, philanthropists, authors of monographs on Christo, and good friends of the artist
Unframed
Early poster from 1972 of this iconic project; collectors' item when hand signed
On August 10, 1972, in Rifle, Colorado, between Grand Junction and Glenwood Springs in the Grand Hogback Mountain Range, at 11 am a group of 35 construction workers and 64 temporary helpers, art-school and college students, and itinerant art workers tied down the last of 27 ropes that secured the 18,600 square meters (200,200 square feet) of woven nylon fabric orange curtain to its moorings at Rifle Gap, 11.3 km (7 miles) north of Rifle, on Highway 325.
Valley Curtain was designed by Dimiter Zagoroff and John Thomson of Unipolycon of Lynn, Massachusetts, and Dr. Ernest C. Harris of Ken R. White Company, Denver, Colorado. It was built by A and H Builders, Inc. of Boulder, Colorado, President Theodore Dougherty, under the site supervision of Henry B. Leininger.
Because the curtain was suspended at a width of 381 meters (1,250 feet) and a height curving from 111 meters (365 feet) at each end to 55.5 meters (182 feet) at the center, the curtain remained clear of the slopes and the valley bottom. A 3-meter (10-foot) skirt attached to the lower part of the curtain visually completed the area between the thimbles and the ground.
An outer cocoon enclosed the fully fitted curtain for protection during transit and at the time of its raising into position and securing to the eleven cable-clamps connections at the four main upper cables. The cables spanned 417 meters (1,368 feet), weighed 61 tons and were anchored to 864 tons of concrete foundations.

An inner cocoon, integral to the curtain, provided added insurance. The bottom of the curtain was laced to a 7.6-centimeter-(3-inch)-diameter Dacron rope from which the control and tie-down lines ran to the 27 anchors.
The Valley Curtain project took 28 months to complete.

Publisher
Christo, photo credit: Shunk Kender