Christo, Trump and the Art World’s Biggest Protest Yet

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With one dramatic no, a major artist has just escalated the culture world’s war against Donald J. Trump.

For more than 20 years, the artist Christo has worked tirelessly and spent $15 million of his own money to create a vast public artwork in Colorado that would draw thousands of tourists and rival the ambition of “The Gates,” the saffron transformation of Central Park that made him and Jeanne-Claude, his collaborator and wife, two of the most talked-about artists of their generation.

But Christo said this week that he had decided to walk away from the Colorado project — a silvery canopy suspended temporarily over 42 miles of the Arkansas River — because the terrain, federally owned, has a new landlord he refuses to have anything to do with: President Trump.

His decision is by far the most visible — and costly — protest of the new administration from within the art world, whose dependence on ultra-wealthy and sometimes politically conservative collectors has tended to inhibit galleries, museums and artists from the kind of full-throated public disavowal of Mr. Trump expressed by some other segments of the creative world. Last week, the artist Richard Prince fired an opening salvo, returning a $36,000 payment for an artwork depicting Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, owned by her family.

The Christo project, titled “Over the River,” conceived with his wife, who died in 2009, has been fiercely opposed in state and federal court by a group of Coloradans who contend that it will endanger wildlife and cause other problems in Bighorn Sheep Canyon. Almost six miles of fabric panels were to be erected over the river for two weeks, at a cost that could have exceeded $50 million. Christo, who sells artwork depicting his proposed projects to pay for them completely on his own, has prevailed in every court battle and is awaiting a decision by a federal appeals court that would represent a final stand by opponents.

But in an interview on Tuesday, he said that even if he won the case, he would no longer go forward with the work.

“I came from a Communist country,” said Christo, 81, who was born Christo Vladimirov Javacheff in Bulgaria and moved to New York with Jeanne-Claude in 1964, becoming an American citizen in 1973. “I use my own money and my own work and my own plans because I like to be totally free. And here now, the federal government is our landlord. They own the land. I can’t do a project that benefits this landlord.”

Asked to elaborate on his views of the new president, he said only, “The decision speaks for itself.” He added, “My decision process was that, like many others, I never believed that Trump would be elected.”

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