Park life: an ambitious temporary installation by Christo briefly animated the green swathes of New York's Central Park.

New Yorkers are fiercely protective of Central Park, and that is why it took 26 years for Christo and his partner Jeanne-Claude to realize their visionary art work, The Gates. For the last two weeks of February, 23 of the 58 miles of pathways through the 840-acre park were spanned by fluttering panels of rip-stop nylon, supported from 7532 tall vinyl frames in the same marigold hue. The sketches that the artists sell to fund their different projects were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and have been published by Yale as a book, so there were no surprises in terms of form, colour, and deployment. The delight came--as it does with all these artists' projects from the interaction of one simple idea with the physical setting and the unpredictable behaviour of people, weather, and light.

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Central Park was designed in the 1850s as rus in urbe, an idealized landscape intended to promote social values, and it has become holy ground for joggers and tree-huggers, dog owners and nature-deprived kids on field trips. The Gates framed all these activities and were enriched by them. The vibrant orange of the vinyl and nylon evoked a blaze of autumnal foliage in the dead of winter, playing off the skeletal trees and shimmering in frozen lakes. Granite outcrops provided vantage points from which to view rippling lines of orange that curved, climbed, and converged in response to the artistry of Olmsted and Vaux. A wind lifted one row while leaving others still, until, gaining strength, it set them all in motion. Impossible not to recall Wordsworth's 'host of golden daffodils/ Beside the lake, beneath the trees/Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.'

'We wish to create works of art of joy and beauty,' says Jeanne-Claude. All their projects--from a first guerrilla effort in blocking a Parisian street with oil drums for a few late-night hours, through the wrapping of the Pont Neuf and the Reichstag (AR August 1995), can also be viewed as happenings, intended to provoke a wide range of responses. Patience and persuasion are key factors in everything this couple does. As an art student in Sofia, Christo was sent out to the country on government-organized expeditions to help prettify the farms along the route of the Orient Express, so that affluent Western passengers, bound for Paris or Istanbul, would glimpse a seemingly prosperous land, not the squalid reality of a collective state. It was good preparation for the task of persuading 459 Japanese landowners to install clusters of 20ft-high umbrellas in their fields, and to win over sceptical preservationists, bureaucrats, and neighbourhood committees on four continents.

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'At the basic level, I think the projects have a subversive dimension, and this is why I have so many problems,' says Christo. 'The great power of the project is that it's absolutely irrational.' New York was the toughest challenge of all. Nearly everyone was initially aghast at the prospect of so intrusive a work in their piece of paradise, but the artists overcame all objections, promising to respect every twig and patch of turf by designing self-supporting structures that would leave no mark. Platoons of paid volunteers were recruited for a brilliantly organized job of installation and removal. They also answered the repeated questions--'What does it mean?' 'How much did it cost?' 'Is it art?'--with great good humour and handed out small samples of fabric to discourage souvenir hunters from clipping their own.