Bulgarians Come a Long Way to See It on the Grapevine : Art: Two art critics trek to Gorman to see Christo’s ‘Umbrellas.’ They say he is a very popular figure at home and an inspiration to young artists.

Among the thousands of people who have trekked through the Tejon Pass to see Christo’s “Umbrellas” few have been more intensely interested than art critics Luchezar Boyadjiev and Philip Zidarov of Bulgaria, the country that Christo Javacheff left 33 years ago.

“ ‘Umbrellas’ is a gift that disappears in a few weeks but grows symbolically and spiritually to an incredible dimension. Each one of us has memories of it that grow to mass proportions and become a social reality,” Boyadjiev said, after visiting the project with a group of critics who recently gathered in Santa Monica for a meeting of the International Assn. of Art Critics.

“It’s an artwork that exceeds its measurements,” Zidarov said. “Christo uses the planet as his palette. I wish we could have stayed longer and really gone into it as the colors change, the wind blows, the dust settles and the mist comes. He thought of all this; it’s not a coincidence.”

“Umbrellas” is the first of Christo’s large projects that either critic had seen and it exceeded their high expectations.

“At first it seemed too simple, but as you travel along the whole length of it, there is a repetition, a spiritual rhythm that’s important to perceiving it as a whole. There’s also diversity as you follow a line over a hill and then see a whole field of umbrellas just standing there mutely,” Boyadjiev said.

“What’s most important is that he really shaped nature and in such a brilliant way,” Zidarov said.

Christo, who moved to Paris in 1958, emigrated to the United States in 1964 and became an American citizen in 1973, is an immensely popular figure in Bulgaria and an inspiration to young artists, the Sofia-based critics said. As an emigre, his name was taboo for many years and couldn’t be mentioned without fear of reprisals from hard-line communists who controlled exhibitions, studios and artists’ employment, Boyadjiev said.

But those days are over and the artist who installed 1,760 yellow umbrellas in California and 1,340 blue umbrellas in Japan in a $26-million extravaganza is something of a national hero. The coincidental timing of the project with recent parliamentary elections--which appeared to loosen the grip of the Bulgarian National Socialist Party--provided symbolism suggesting that “the communists were blown away in Bulgaria when the umbrellas opened,” Zidarov said.

It’s ironic that the art world’s big spender was born in Gabrovo, a city whose notoriously thrifty citizens are the butt of jokes, Boyadjiev said. They erected a monument to the city’s founder on an island in the middle of a river to avoid wasting precious land, he said. And according to Gabrovo folklore, these penurious folks cut off the tails of their cats so they will pass through doors more quickly, minimizing the loss of warmth from stingily heated living rooms.

The visiting critics, whose transportation to the international critics conference was subsidized by a grant from the J. Paul Getty Trust, are unperturbed by the cost of Christo’s projects. “The Soviet system offered the lure of beauty, but all we got was a foreign debt. We never got the beauty. Christo also wastes money in common-sense terms, but with him at least we get the beauty,” Boyadjiev said.

While there is nothing typically Bulgarian about Christo’s art, it is significant that he was raised and educated in a rigidly Stalinist country, the critics said. His practice of wrapping objects and entire buildings likely stems from his experience as an art student in Sofia when he was dispatched into the countryside to paint a happy face on farms along the Orient Express, thus “wrapping” poverty in affluent packaging for the eyes of foreign travelers, Boyadjiev said.

The wrapped projects and those incorporating vast stretches of landscape are both concerned with such concepts as screens, partitions, divisions and--particularly in the case of “Umbrellas”--a world vision of reconciliation and unity, the critics said.

“Of course it’s impossible to see the entire work in Japan and California at the same time--except on television and then it’s a collage--but Christo presents the utopian concept of having such a viewpoint . . . and seeing the world as one,” Boyadjiev said.