Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons in New York Photo: Chris Fanning
Birth name	Jeffrey Koons
Born	January 21, 1955 (age 58) York, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Nationality	American
Field	Artist
Training	School of the Art Institute of Chicago Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore
Works	Puppy (1992) Balloon Dog (1994-2000)

Jeffrey “Jeff” Koons (born January 21, 1955) is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces. He lives and works in both New York City and his hometown of York, Pennsylvania.

His works have sold for substantial sums of money, including at least one world record auction price for a work by a living artist. On November 12, 2013, Koons’s Balloon Dog (Orange) sold at Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale in New York for $58.4 million, above its high $55 million estimate, becoming the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction.^[1] The price topped Koons’s previous record of $33.7 million^[2] and the record for the most expensive living artist, held by Gerhard Richter, whose 1968 painting, Domplatz, Mailand, sold for $37.1 million at Sotheby’s in May.^[3] Balloon Dog (Orange) was one of the first of the Balloon Dogs to be fabricated, and had been acquired by Greenwich collector Peter Brant in the late 1990s.^[4]

Critics are sharply divided in their views of Koons. Some view his work as pioneering and of major art-historical importance. Others dismiss his work as kitsch: crass and based on cynical self-merchandising. Koons has stated that there are no hidden meanings in his works,^[5] nor any critiques.^[6]

Early life and education

Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania to Henry and Gloria Koons. His father^[7] was a furniture dealer and interior decorator; his mother was a seamstress.^[8] As a child he went door to door after school selling gift-wrapping paper and candy to earn pocket-money.^[9] As a teenager he revered Salvador Dalí, to the extent that he visited him at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City. Koons studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maryland Institute College of Art. While a visiting student at the Art Institute, Koons met the artist Ed Paschke, who became a major influence and for whom he worked as a studio assistant in the late 1970s.^[10] After college, he moved to New York in 1977^[11] and worked at the membership desk of the Museum of Modern Art^[12] while establishing himself as an artist. During this time, he dyed his hair red and would often cultivate a pencil mustache, after Dalí.^[11] In 1980, he got licensed to sell mutual funds and stocks and began working as a Wall Street commodities broker at First Investors Corporation. After a summer with his parents in Sarasota, Florida (Koons took on a brief job there as a political canvasser), he returned to New York and found a new career as a commodities broker, first at Clayton Brokerage Company and then at Smith Barney.^[11]

Personal life

While a student at the Maryland College of Art, Koons fathered a daughter, Shannon Rodgers. Though he offered to marry the girl’s mother, she felt that they were too young for the commitment, and the couple reluctantly put the child up for adoption. Shannon Rodgers reconnected with Koons in 1995.^[13]

In 1991, he married Hungarian-born naturalized-Italian pornography star Cicciolina (Ilona Staller) who for five years (1987–92) pursued an alternate career as a member of the Italian parliament. After seeing her picture in two European magazines, he had flown to Rome, watched her perform, and gone backstage to suggest that they collaborate on what he then thought would be a movie. She agreed. A series of strenuous photographic sessions became the basis for the “Made in Heaven” paintings and sculptures, in various media. The movie never got made, but Koons and Staller fell in love. He courted her through an interpreter–she spoke very little English, and Koons, who spoke about four words of Italian, kept trying to communicate directly by speaking English with an Italian accent. The interpreter had to be let go, because she fell in love with Koons. He proposed to Staller in Venice that spring, and they were married a year later. While maintaining a home in Manhattan, Koons and Staller lived in Munich.^[14] In 1992, they had a son, Ludwig. The marriage ended soon afterward amid allegations that Koons had subjected Staller to physical and emotional abuse.^[15] Jeffrey Deitch, a close friend who became Koons’s dealer after Sonnabend, couldn’t understand the marriage to Staller. Koons himself says that Ileana Sonnabend and his father had warned him against it, fearing the worst. “Jeff had confused fantasy with reality,” Deitch said. “It was as though he felt the ‘Made in Heaven’ work wouldn’t be authentic unless they were married. It was a moral issue for him.” The marriage began to fall apart even before their child, Ludwig, was born. Staller wanted to keep on performing. (She also offered, publicly, to have sex with Saddam Hussein in exchange for his releasing foreigners held in Iraq.) And then, after divorce proceedings had begun in New York, Staller spirited baby Ludwig out of the New York town house that Koons had rented for them and took him to Rome. Koons spent more than a decade and millions of dollars in legal battles over custody. The battle ensued with the award of sole custody to Koons by the U.S. court in 1998, which had also dissolved the marriage. However, he lost custody when the case went to Italy’s Supreme Court.^[16] In 2008, Staller filed suit against Koons for failure to pay child support.^[17]

Koons is now married to Justine Wheeler, an artist and former employee who began working for Koons’ studio in 1995. The couple have six children.^[18]

Work

Jeff Koons rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a media-saturated era.^[19] He gained recognition in the 1980s and subsequently set up a factory-like studio in a SoHo loft on the corner of Houston Street and Broadway in New York. It was staffed with over 30 assistants, each assigned to a different aspect of producing his work—in a similar mode as Andy Warhol‘s Factory (notable because all of his work is produced using a method known as Art fabrication).^[20] Today, he has a 1,500 m² (16,000 sq ft) factory near the old Hudson rail yards^[21] in Chelsea, working with 90 to 120^[21] regular assistants.^[8] Koons developed a color-by-numbers system, so that each of his assistants^[22] could execute his canvases and sculptures as if they had been done “by a single hand”.^[7] “I think art takes you outside yourself, takes you past yourself. I believe that my journey has really been to remove my own anxiety. That’s the key. The more anxiety you can remove, the more free you are to make that gesture, whatever the gesture is. The dialogue is first with the artist, but then it goes outward, and is shared with other people. And if the anxiety is removed everything is so close, everything is available, and it’s just this little bit of confidence, or trust, that people have to delve into.”^[23]

The Pre-New, The New, and Equilibrium series

Since 1979 Koons has produced work within series.^[24] His early work was in the form of conceptual sculpture, an example of which is The Pre-New, a series of domestic objects attached to light fixtures, resulting in strange new configurations. Another example is The New, a series of vacuum-cleaners, often selected for brand names that appealed to the artist, which he had mounted in illuminated Perspex boxes. Koons first exhibited these pieces in the window of the New Museum in New York in 1980. He chose a limited combination of vacuum cleaners and arranged them in cabinets accordingly, juxtaposing the verticality of the upright cleaners with the squat cylinders of the “Shelton Wet/Dry drum” cleaners. At the museum, the machines were displayed as if in a showroom, and oriented around a central red fluorescent lightbox with just the words “The New” written on it as if it were announcing some new concept or marketing brand.^[25] Another example for Koon’s early work is The Equilibrium Series (1985), consisting of one to three basketballs floating in distilled water, a project the artist had researched with the help of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.^[7] The Total Equilibrium Tanks are completely filled with distilled water and a small amount of ordinary salt, to assist the hollow balls in remaining suspended in the centre of the liquid. In a second version, the 50/50 Tanks, only half the tank is filled with distilled water, with the result that the balls float half in and half out of the water.^[26] In addition, Koons conceived and fabricated five unique works for the Encased series (1983-1993/98), sculptures consisting of stacked sporting balls with their original cardboard packaging in glass display case.^[27]

Statuary series

Koons started creating sculptures using inflatable toys in the 1970s. Taking a readymade inflatable rabbit Koons cast the object in highly polished stainless steel, resulting in Rabbit (1986), one of his most famous artworks. Originally part of the private collection of Ileana Sonnabend, Rabbit is today owned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. A proof of the sculpture is owned by Eli Broad.

The Rabbit has since returned to its original soft form, and, many times larger at more than 50 feet high, taken to the air. On October 13, 2009, the giant metallic monochrome color rabbit used during the 2007 Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade^[28] was put on display for Nuit Blanche in the Eaton Centre in Toronto.

Luxury and Degradation series

First shown in Koons’ eponymous exhibitions at the short-lived International With Monument Gallery, New York, and at Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1986, the Luxury and Degradation series is a group of works thematically centered on alcohol. This group included a stainless steel travel cocktail cabinet, a Baccarat crystal decanter and other hand-made renderings of alcohol-related paraphernalia, as well as reprinted and framed ads for drinks such as Gordon’s Gin (“I Could Go for Something Gordon’s”), Hennessy (“Hennessy, The Civilized Way to Lay Down the Law”), Martell (“I Assume You Drink Martell”) and Frangelico (“Stay in Tonight” and “Find a Quiet Table”)^[29] in seductively intensified colors on canvas^[8] Another work, Jim Beam – J.B. Turner Engine (1986) is based on a commemorative, collectible in bottle in the form of a locomotive that was created by Jim Beam; however, Koons appropriated this model and had it cast in gleaming stainless-steel.^[30] The train model cast in steel titled Jim Beam – Baggage Car (1986) even contains Jim Beam bourbon.

Banality series

Koons then moved on to the Banality series. For this project he engaged workshops in Germany and Italy that had a long tradition of working in ceramic, porcelain, and wood.^[11] The series culminated in 1988 with Michael Jackson and Bubbles, a series of three life-size gold-leaf plated porcelain statues of the sitting singer cuddling Bubbles, his pet chimpanzee. Three years later, one of these sold at Sotheby’s New York for $5.6 million. Two of these sculptures are now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The statue was included in a 2004 retrospective at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo which traveled a year later to the Helsinki City Art Museum. It also featured in his second retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 2008. The statue is currently back at the newly opened Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art at Tjuvholmen in Oslo.

Anticipating a less than generous critical response to his 1988 Banality series exhibition, with all of his new objects made in an edition of three,^[31] allowing for simultaneous, identical shows at galleries in New York, Cologne, and Chicago, Koons devised the Art Magazine Ads series (1988–89).^[32] Placed in Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, and Art News, the ads were designed as promotions for his own gallery exhibitions.^[33] Koons also issued Signature Plate, an edition for Parkett magazine, with a photographic decal in colors on a porcelain plate with gold-plated rim.^[34] Arts journalist Arifa Akbar reported for The Independent that in “an era when artists were not regarded as ‘stars’, Koons went to great lengths to cultivate his public persona by employing an image consultant.” Featuring photographs by Matt Chedgey, Koons placed “advertisements in international art magazines of himself surrounded by the trappings of success” and gave interviews “referring to himself in the third person.”^[20]

Made in Heaven series

In 1989 the Whitney Museum asked Koons to make an artwork about the media on a billboard^[7] for the show “Image World: Art and Media Culture”. Koons employed Ilona Staller as a model in the shoot that formed the basis of the resulting work for the Whitney, Made in Heaven (1990–91).^[35] The series of paintings, photographs, and sculptures portrayed Koons and Staller in explicit sexual positions and created considerable controversy. It was first shown at the 1990 Venice Biennale.^[36] Koons reportedly destroyed much of the work when Staller took their son Ludwig with her to Italy.^[37] In celebration of Made in Heaven’s 20th anniversary, Luxembourg & Dayan chose to present a redux edition of the series.^[38][39]

Puppy

Puppy in Bilbao

Tulips in Bilbao

Koons was not among the 44 American artists selected to exhibit his work in Documenta 9 in 1992,^[40] but was commissioned by three art dealers to create a piece for nearby Arolsen Castle in Bad Arolsen, Germany. The result was Puppy, a 43 ft (13 m) tall topiary sculpture of a West Highland White Terrier puppy, executed in a variety of flowers (including Marigolds, Begonias, Impatiens, Petunias, and Lobelias)^[41] on a transparent colour-coated chrome stainless steel substructure. In 1995, the sculpture was dismantled and re-erected at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Sydney Harbour on a new, more permanent, stainless steel armature with an internal irrigation system. While the Arolsen Puppy had 20 000 plants, the Sydney version held around 60 000.^[42]

The piece was purchased in 1997 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and installed on the terrace outside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.^[43] Before the dedication at the museum, an Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) trio disguised as gardeners attempted to plant explosive-filled flowerpots near the sculpture,^[44] but was foiled by Basque police officer Jose María Aguirre, who then was shot dead by ETA members.^[45][46] Currently the square in which the statue is placed bears the name of Aguirre. In the summer of 2000, the statue traveled to New York City for a temporary exhibition at Rockefeller Center.^[41]

Media mogul Peter Brant and his wife, model Stephanie Seymour, commissioned Koons to create a duplicate of the Bilbao statue Puppy (1993) for their Connecticut estate, the Brant Foundation Art Study Center.^[47] In 1998, a miniature version of Puppy was released as a white glazed porcelain vase, in an edition of 3000.^[48]

Celebration series

Koons entitled Celebration, to honor the ardently hoped-for return of Ludwig from Rome. Consists of a series of large-scale sculptures and paintings of, among others balloon dogs, Valentine hearts, diamonds, and Easter eggs, was conceived in 1994. Some of the pieces are still being fabricated. Each of the 20 different sculptures in the series comes in five differently colored “unique versions”,^[49] including the artist’s cracked Egg (Blue) won the 2008 Charles Wollaston Award for the most distinguished work in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition.^[50] The Diamond pieces were created between 1994 and 2005, made of shiny stainless steel seven-feet wide.^[51] Created in an edition of five versions, his later work Tulips (1995–2004) consists of a bouquet of multicolor balloon flowers blown up to gargantuan proportions (more than 2 m (6.6 ft) tall and 5 m (16 ft) across).^[52] Koons finally started to work on Balloon Flower in 1995.^[53]

Koons was pushing to finish the series in time for a 1996 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, but the show was ultimately canceled because of production delays and cost overruns.^[54] When “Celebration” funding ran out, the staff was laid off, leaving a skeleton crew of two: Gary McCraw, Koons’s studio manager, who had been with him since 1990, and Justine Wheeler, an artist from South Africa, who had arrived in 1995 and eventually took charge of the sculpture operation. The artist convinced his primary collectors Dakis Joannou, Peter Brant, and Eli Broad, along with dealers Jeffrey Deitch, Anthony d’Offay, and Max Hetzler, to invest heavily in the costly fabrication of the Celebration series at Arnold, a Frankfurt-based company. The dealers funded the project in part by selling works to collectors before they were fabricated.^[55] In 1999, his 1988 “Pink Panther” sculpture sold at auction for $1.8 million, and he returned to the Sonnabend gallery. Well aware of Koons’s bottomless needs and demands, Ileana Sonnabend and Antonio Homem, her gallery director and adopted son, nevertheless welcomed him back; in all likelihood they sensed (correctly, it turned out) that he was poised for a glorious second act–something that only he, among his generation of overpublicized artists, has so far managed to pull off. Koons, however, no longer confines himself to a single gallery. Larry Gagosian, the colossus of New York dealers, agreed to finance the completion of all the unfinished “Celebration” work, in exchange for exclusive rights to sell it.

In 2006, Koons presented Hanging Heart, a 9 feet tall highly polished, steel heart, one of a series of five differently colored examples, part of his Celebration series.^[56] Large sculptures from that series were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2008. Later additions to the series include Balloon Swan (2004–2011), an 11.5-foot (3.5-metre), stainless-steel bird,^[57] Balloon Rabbit (2005–2010), and Balloon Monkey, all for which children’s party favors are reconceived as mesmerizing monumental forms.^[58]

The series also includes, in addition to sculptures, sixteen^[59] oil paintings.^[60]

Popeye and Hulk Elvis series

Paintings and sculptures from the Popeye series, which Koons began in 2002, feature the cartoon figures of Popeye and Olive Oyl.^[61] The works Hulk (Friends) and Hulks (Bell) (both 2004-2012) feature apparently inflatable Incredible Hulks that actually weigh almost a ton each and are made of bronze and wood.^[62]

Antiquity series

Referring to the ancient Roman marble statue Callipygian Venus, Metallic Venus (2010–2012) was made of high chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating and live flowering plants.^[62]

At the center of each scene in the Antiquity paintings (2009–13) is a famous ancient or classical sculpture, meticulously rendered in oil paint and scaled to the same size as the sculptures. The equally detailed backdrops include an Arcadian vision.^[63]

Recent work

Commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim in 1999, Koons began a new series, Easyfun, comprising paintings and wall-mounted sculptures. One year later, he designed Split-Rocker, his second floral sculpture made of stainless steel, soil, geotextile fabric, and an internal irrigation system, which was first shown at the Palais des Papes in Avignon. In 2001, Koons undertook a series of paintings, Easyfun-Ethereal, using a collage approach that combined bikinis, food, and landscapes painted under his supervision by assistants.^[64] For the season 2007/2008 in the Vienna State Opera Jeff Koons designed the large scale picture (176 sqm) Geisha as part of the exhibition series “Safety Curtain”, conceived by museum in progress.^[65] Koons is currently working with American pop performer Lady Gaga on her 2013 studio album Artpop, including the creation of its cover artwork featuring a sculpture he made of Lady Gaga.^[66]

Other

In 1999, Koons commissioned a song about himself on Momus‘s album Stars Forever.

In 2006, he appeared on Artstar, an unscripted television series set in the New York art world and from February 15 to March 6, 2008, he donated a private tour of his studio to the Hereditary Disease Foundation for auction on Charitybuzz.

Kiepenkerl, located in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

A drawing similar to his Tulip Balloons was placed on the front page of the Internet search engine Google. The drawing greeted all who visited Google’s main page on April 30, 2008 and May 1, 2008.^[67]

Koons had a minor role in the 2008 film Milk playing state assemblyman Art Agnos.^[68]

From his 2010 Tulip designs for Kiehls Crème de Corps, a portion of the proceeds go to the Koons Family Institute.^[21]

In September 2012, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo gave Koons the task of helping to review the designs for a new Tappan Zee Bridge.^[69]

Curating

Koons acted as curator of an Ed Paschke exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, New York, in 2009.^[70] In 2010 he curated an exhibition of works from the private collection of Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou at the New Museum in New York City. The exhibition, Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection, generated debate concerning cronyism within the art world as Koons is heavily collected by Joannou and had previously designed the exterior of Joannou’s yacht Guilty.^[71]

BMW Art Car

The Koons-designed car — driven by Dirk Müller, Andy Priaulx and Dirk Werner — was retired after 53 laps of the race.

Jeff Koons was the artist named to design the seventeenth in the series of BMW “Art Cars”. His artwork was applied to a race-spec E92 BMW M3, and revealed to the public at The Pompidou Centre in Paris on 2 June 2010.^[72] Backed by BMW Motorsport, the car then competed at the 2010 24 Hours of Le Mans in France.^[73]

Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP

He collaborated with American recording artist Lady Gaga for her third studio album, ARTPOP.^[74] The album cover depicts a nude sculpture of Gaga made by Jeff Koons in front of a blue ball sculpture, and pieces of other art works in the background such as “Birth of Venus” painted by Sandro Botticelli, which inspired Gaga’s image through the new era, including in her music video for “Applause” and the VMA performance of the song.^[75] The image of the cover was revealed piece-by-piece in a social marketing campaign where her fans had to tweet the Twitter hashtag “#iHeartARTPOP” to unlock it.^[76]

Wine

Koons has also produced some fine wine-related commissions. In December 2012, Chateau Mouton Rothschild announced that Koons was the artist for their 2010 vintage label – a tradition that was started in 1946. Other artists to design labels include Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Salvador Dalí & Joan Miró, amongst others.^[77] In August 2013, Dom Perignon released their 2003 vintage, with a special edition done by Koons, as well as a made-to-order case called the ‘Balloon Venus’. This has an recommended retail price of e15,000.

Exhibitions

Since a 1980 window installation at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Koons’ work has been widely exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions. In 1986, he appeared in a group show with Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton, and Meyer Vaisman at Sonnabend Gallery in New York. In 1997, the Galerie Jerome de Noirmont organised his first solo show in Europe. His Made in Heaven series was first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1990.^[36]

His museum solo shows include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1988), Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (1993), Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin (2000), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2001), the Museo archeologico nazionale di Napoli (2003), and a retrospective survey at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2004), which traveled to the Helsinki City Art Museum (2005). In 2008, the Celebration series was shown at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.^[78]

Considered as his first retrospective in France, the 2008 exhibition of 17 Koons sculptures at the Chateau de Versailles also marked the first ambitious display of a contemporary American artist organized by the chateau. The New York Times reported that “several dozen people demonstrated outside the palace gates” in a protest arranged by a little-known, right-wing group dedicated to French artistic purity. It was also criticised that ninety percent of the $2.8 million in financing for the exhibition came from private patrons, mainly François Pinault.^[79]

The May 31 – September 21, 2008 Koons retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,^[8][80][81] which was widely publicized in the press, broke the museum’s attendance record with 86,584 visitors.^[82][83] The exhibition included numerous works from the MCA collection, along with recent paintings and sculptures by the artist. The retrospective exhibition reflects the MCA’s commitment to Koons’s work as it presented the artist’s first American survey in 1988.^[84] For the final exhibition in its Marcel Breuer building, the Whitney Museum is planning to present a Koons retrospective in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.^[85]

In July 2009, Koons had his first major solo show in London, at the Serpentine Gallery. Entitled Jeff Koons: Popeye Series, the exhibit included cast aluminum models of children’s pool toys and “dense, realist paintings of Popeye holding his can of spinach or smoking his pipe, a red lobster looming over his head.” ^[86]

In May 2012, Koons had his first major solo show in Switzerland, at the Beyeler Museum in Basel, entitled Jeff Koons. Shown are works from three series: The New,Banality and Celebration as well as the flowered sculpture Split-Rocker.^[87]

Also in 2012, Jeff Koons. The Painter at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt focussed primarily on the artist’s development as a painter, while in the show Jeff Koons. The Sculptor at the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt, the sculptures by Jeff Koons entered enter into dialogues with the historical building and a sculpture collection spanning five millennia. ^[88] Together, both shows form the largest showing of Koons’s work to date.^[89]

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[ARTS 315] Contemporary Laments: An Update on the Human Condition – Jon Anderson

Published on Apr 5, 2012

‘The Dream’ (Rune Hellestad / Corbis)

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