A towering figure group called Christmas Angels reaching eight-feet in height made from miles of wire stretch have appeared along the Channel Gardens every year at Rockefeller Center installed since 1954. They are winged, robed and haloed, each holding a 6-foot-long brass trumpet toward the famed Christmas tree that heralds the holiday season. Much like the world-famous Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree these 12 angels created by the artist Valerie Clarebout are an annual presence at Christmastime in NYC. Clarebout designed both the figures and the luminous snowflakes to sparkle with light and energy from thousands of tiny glittering lights.
It took 75 pounds of wire to build each 8-foot-tall winged figure. The angels are arranged to face one another along the Channel Gardens with fountains turned off serenading passersby on the way to Center Plaza. In total, Clarebout used 76 miles of material including 18 miles of brass wire wrapped around an aluminum armature (framework used by a sculptor to support a figure) plus thousands of minature lights to complete the celestial display.
While there is plenty of world-class art to be seen in and around Rockefeller Center, Clarebout's sculptures are unique in their semi-permanence.
She's the only artist whose work is regularly installed and removed for a period of time. She came back year after year to work on them.
Christine Roussel
Rockefeller Center archivist
Born in the early 1900s, Clarebout studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and Julien Studio in Paris before moving to the United States in 1952. Robert Carson, Rockefeller Center's architect, soon hired the inventive sculptor to design angels for the Plaza. She went on to produce other collections that included 9-foot-tall snowmen, 12 elegant reindeer and even one project comprised of 72 animals and four 8-foot-tall trees. She eventually made the Christmas angels we see today, working out of her New Fairfield, Connecticut studio.
A year before her passing in 1982, Clarebout spoke to the New York Times about the angels saying: I love them I love this time of year. Since I was a child I had a tremendous feeling for Christmas quite apart from a religious holiday. I used to lie on the ground and I thought I could feel the earth being reborn. That's how I always thought of Christmas .. as the rebirth of the earth. And now, of course, every year I think of it as bringing the angels back to life.
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