The Most Expensive Beetle?

Christo & Jeanne-Claude and their $4,000,000 Beetle

Although it’s a little vulgar, I’m going to start with the price – which is 4 million dollars. This price makes this car maybe the most expensive Type1 VW Beetle ever to change hands. What’s so special about it? Well … technically, nothing. It’s not a KDF-wagen, a rare coach-built Hebmüller. It’s a well restored 1961 (L380 Turquoise) stock Beetle which has been wrapped up like a gift and displayed as a piece of art and, get this, it’s not even the original piece of art! I should probably say here as an art lover that of course art is widely considered to be subjective, meaning that its appreciation and interpretation are influenced by individual perspectives, experiences, and cultural backgrounds. What one person finds beautiful, meaningful (or valuable), another may not and vice versa, so maybe it’s all about who wrapped it up rather than what’s wrapped up. I’ll leave it to you to decide.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude were stylish artists noted for their large-scale, site-specific environmental installations – often large landmarks and landscape elements wrapped in fabric. Born in Bulgaria and Morocco, the pair met, fell in love and married in Paris during the late 1950s. Christo introduced Jeanne-Claude to the world of art and they rather quickly started to work together.

Between them they became famous for executing works such as such as wrapping the Arc de Triomphe, and wrapping islands in the Bay of Miami in Florida with 6.5 million square feet of floating fabric. The Reichstag, the Running Fence in California and The Gates in New York City’s Central Park were also colossal projects executed during their careers, but at the start their scope was decidedly more modest.

Originally, while working under just Christo’s name in 1963, the couple convinced Claus Harden, a colleague of photographer and filmmaker Charles Wilp, to lend them his 1961 (L380 Turquoise) VW Beetle, which Christo wrapped in waxed cloth and installed outside a gallery in Düsseldorf, entitled “Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon”. The show was a great hit with both critics and the public, which really put them on the map. When the show was over, the fabric came off and the car sadly had to be returned. According to Christo’s nephew, Vladimir Yavachev, “the friend had only just saved up enough money to buy the Beetle, so he wanted it back and in those days there was no way the couple would be able to afford to make an offer to buy it from him.”

That was ostensibly the end of that particular piece of art, but the duo continued getting bigger and bigger not only with the size of their projects but with the popularity of their work which they began crediting to both “Christo and Jeanne-Claude”.

Fast forward to half-century later. Christo was lecturing in Dusseldorf when a man in the audience raised his hand. He said, “Hey, remember me?” It was Claus Harden, who he had lost touch with all those years ago. He continued, “It was my car, and taking off the wrapping was the biggest mistake of my life!”

This spun the couple into a bout of nostalgia and they made the decision to revisit the project once again. Yavachev recalls: “They had a kind of attachment to that wrapped Beetle because, ultimately, the work was related to freedom and we so much associate the Beetle with freedom and the counterculture of the 1960s.”

Shortly after the lecture, Christo bought a perfectly restored (L380 Turquoise) 1961 Volkswagen Beetle which he said wasn’t difficult to find – the same model and colour he and Jeanne-Claude had borrowed more than 50 years earlier. Yavachev explains that the hardest part was persuading Christo to get inside: “The idea was to pick up the car from its seller on the outskirts of Frankfurt and use the meandering drive back to Switzerland for a rare road trip-style vacation. But Christo wanted to do so many things, so he was always very protective of his life.” It was all because the Beetle didn’t have seat belts. “He was like, ‘Wait … do I have to get into this car?’ And I was like: ‘Yes, you have to. Get in!’” Yavachev says: “The journey was a success and it was time to wrap the car. With Christo, everything is about aesthetics, and he was very particular about using this mustard color of wax tarp and mouse grey rope.”

The following year he completed the work, thus creating “Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon, 1963–2014”. This work not only recreated the original work, but he felt it also celebrated the artistic legacy of the duo, who disbanded only when Jeanne-Claude died in 2009, emphasizing their dedication to transforming ordinary objects into extraordinary works of art. Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon 1963–2014 was exhibited several times in Europe, but for the past decade has been in storage in Basel, Switzerland.

Christo passed away in 2020.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude never received financial support through sponsors or donations for their expensive, elaborate ideas. Instead, they sold sketches and a number of other smaller works created at the earlier stages to finance everything. The art project still belonging to the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation went on sale at the Gagosian Gallery where Art Basel Unlimited opened the sale for VIPs only on 10th June 2024. With an asking price in the region of $4 million, the Beetle was set to be one of the most talked-about works of the “Unlimited Section”. It is also, Yavachev says, “an unprecedented example of a large-scale object wrapped by Christo hitting the market – the closest, in theory, that a collector will come to owning one of the artist’s ephemeral, fully realized projects. It’s very rare,” he says. “I can’t think of something on that scale, with that kind of iconic status that collectors can actually buy and exhibit.” 

Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon, 1963–2014 sold that same day. 

So where is it now? Well … amid the celebrations for the 30th anniversary of the “Wrapped Reichstag”, from 11th June the Neue Nationalgalerie at the Kulturforum, a museum for modern art in Berlin, is showcasing the Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon 1963–2014 as part of an exhibition entitled “Extreme Tension: Art between Politics and Society”. So if you fancy seeing what is thought to be the most valuable VW Type1 in history you now can.