The artist’s works were easy to grasp but hard to categorize, bringing conceptual art to the masses and generating no small measure of happiness and awe in the process.

I’m sorry I never got to ask Christo about Gabrovo, the Bulgarian city where he was born in 1935.

Back in February 2005, I drove with Christo and Jeanne-Claude, his wife and collaborator, at zero hour, when an army of paid helpers wearing matching gray smocks and deployed along 23 miles of footpaths unfurled “The Gates” in Central Park — all 7,500 of them, made from 5,390 tons of steel and more than a million square feet of saffron-colored vinyl.

As with all of their public works, the tab was paid by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, including the cost of clearing the park after the gates were removed, leaving the place in pristine shape and providing the park with a hefty donation afterward.

From the car, they inspected their troops, watching as the fabric was unrolled from the tops of the gates, the bright vinyl flapping in the wind, the twisting rows of gates lighting up the gray, somnolent, wintry park like streamers in a fireworks display.

Early on, his penchant for wrapping everyday objects, like paint cans and oil drums, seemed to link him to ’60s American Pop artists and French Nouveau Realists.

But then he began to wrap whole buildings and to work outdoors on an environmental, megalomaniacal scale that suggested ’70s earth artists like Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria — except that Christo’s installations were temporary, sometimes urban, and they embraced, as an essential component of the art, all the tedious paperwork, financial finagling and negotiations with public officials and neighbors that could drag on for decades and occasionally turn nasty.

With his interest in intangibles and process, Christo was like many other conceptual artists of the ’60s and ’70s.

In lieu of that sham populism, which produced supersized monuments to Marx and Mother Russia — public works meant to last for the ages and imposed by the state on a captive populace — Christo flipped the script.

All of which helps explain why, in 2017, after he and Jeanne-Claude labored for more than two decades and spent some $15 million of their own money on a project in Colorado — a fabric canopy suspended over 42 snaking miles of the Arkansas River — Christo suddenly walked away from the work at the 11th hour.

Gabrovo is the Central Balkan version of the borscht belt, a hardscrabble, endearing city with a proud, headstrong populace and an impish streak

I have visited Gabrovo over the years, the last time not so long ago, and contemplated Christo, native son made good, recalling the sight of him dashing around the Reichstag and stamping his feet in icy Central Park, the center of attention, basking in the glow of “The Gates.”