With just nine shopping days to go until Christmas, this week’s picture is a gift-wrapped piece of modern art by Christo, the open-air sculptor renowned for packaging improbably large objects. He is best known for his audacious temporary alterations to the urban scene, which have included swathing the Pont-Neuf in Paris in gold silk, a feat accomplished in 1985; or, more recently, wrapping the entire Reichstag building in Berlin. The picture reproduced here commemorates one of his quieter and more pastoral “interventions”: the wrapping of 178 trees in some parkland next to the Fondation Beyeler, in Switzerland, a project which was carried out in the winter of 1998.

The artist and his team needed 592,034 square feet of woven polyester fabric (the same stuff used every winter in Japan to protect vulnerable trees from severe frosts and snow) and 14.35 miles of rope to complete their task. Work was begun on 13 November 1998 and completed nine days later. The wrapping was removed on December 14 and all the materials were recycled.

The point of Christo’s work is the almost absolute pointlessness of it all – something done for no other reason than to see how it turned out, in the hope of finding some unusual new kind of beauty, and creating a little bit of innocent surprise and delight. Having spent years persuading the necessary authorities to let him do his own thing in their park, the artist himself seems to have been pleased with the result, to judge by his one brief pronouncement upon it: “The branches of the Wrapped Trees pushing the translucent fabric outward created dynamic volumes of light and shadow, moving in the wind with new forms and surfaces shaped by the ropes on the fabric.”

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