The project The Umbrellas was conceived in 1984, and the production of sketches for the imagined object continued between 1984 and 1991. Yellow umbrellas for California, blue for Japan. This preparatory work from 1990, depicting the blue umbrellas for the Japanese site, bears witness to the final phase of the project’s conception. Combining pencil, pastel, charcoal, enamel paint, and a topographic map, it anchors the artistic vision in the geographic reality of the Sato River valley.

Blue was chosen for Japan in response to its environment and climate : unlike California’s aridity, the Ibaraki region benefits from lush vegetation and verdant rice fields. The umbrellas are thus likened to a vegetal “population,” whose color code is tied to the biotope.

The Japanese site, in the riverbed and on the slopes of the Sato River, hosted 1 340 umbrellas ⁽¹⁾ covering an area of 57 km². It required 920 installers. The project was in place on 9 October 1991 ⁽²⁾.

With this project, Christo shifted the very scale of their in situ interventions : gigantism would henceforth become the most spectacular hallmark of their projects and installations—reaching a peak, in 1991, with the doubling of the installation site of The Umbrellas on both sides of the Pacific ⁽³⁾.

“The Umbrellas were seen, approached, and appreciated by the public for 18 days; either from a distance by car, or up close where they lined the roads, or by walking beneath ‘The Umbrellas’ within their luminous shadows.” ⁽⁴⁾

Reference : Christo (1998/a), Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Umbrellas, Japan‑USA, 1984‑1991, Cologne, Editions B. Taschen, 1422 p. (2 volumes).