Jeff Koons
gigatos | January 24, 2022
Summary
Jeffrey Koons, born January 21, 1955 in York, Pennsylvania, is an American artist and sculptor of neo-pop kitsch style. Among his most famous works are the Inflatable Rabbit, the Balloon Dogs, the Tulips and Michael Jackson and Bubbles. In France, he organized Koons Versailles in the Château and Gardens of Versailles in 2008-2009 and his Retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2014-2015.
Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania, to Henry and Gloria Koons. His father was a furniture dealer and interior decorator. His mother was a seamstress. When Jeff Koons was nine years old, his father placed old paintings copied and signed by his son in the window of his store to attract visitors.
In his youth, Jeff Koons worked with his father, selling ribbons, lace and gift wrap door-to-door, and selling Coca-Cola on a golf course. As a student, he met Salvador Dalí, whom he admired.
After studying at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Jeff Koons moved to New York in 1976. He worked until 1979 as a subscription desk clerk at the Museum of Modern Art. Selling investment funds to finance his lifestyle, he cobbled together artistic experiments, creating his first work, The New, household appliances hung on neon lights. He was soon spotted by the New York art scene.
His beginnings were complicated, however, and when he ran out of money, he returned to his parents, who now lived in Florida, and worked for a time as a political canvasser.
He returned to New York and created the Equilibrium series, presented in his first exhibition in 1985 at the ephemeral International with Monument gallery.
He becomes a commodities broker on Wall Street to finance his artistic production.
Jeff Koons came to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art at a time of media saturation. He created a factory-like studio in a loft in SoHo at the corner of Houston Street and Broadway in New York City, consisting of over thirty assistants. Each assistant was assigned to a different aspect of the production of his work, in a mode similar to Andy Warhol”s “Factory” (notable because all of his work is produced using a method known as art making). Today, he has a 1,500-square-foot factory near former railroad yards in Chelsea, working with 90 to 120 regular assistants. Koons developed a color-by-number system, so that each of his assistants can execute his paintings and sculptures as if they were made by one hand.
He said of art, “I think art takes you outside of yourself, beyond yourself. I think my journey has really been to remove my anxiety. That”s the key. The more anxiety you can remove, the freer you are to make that move. The dialogue is paramount with the artist, but then it goes outward and is shared with other people. And if the anxiety goes away, everything is so close, everything is available, and it”s just that little bit of self-confidence, or trust, that people need to deepen.”
Success having smiled upon him, his works are now produced in a studio, located in Chelsea, with more than 100 assistants. He does not create any work himself, but rather initiates ideas that he has his professional collaborators execute.
His Inflatable Rabbit, an inflatable rabbit made of stainless steel in 1986, and his Balloon Dogs are now considered by major collectors, including François Pinault, as emblematic works of the late 20th century.
Jeff Koons” art can be seen as the meeting point of several concepts: Marcel Duchamp”s ready-mades, Claes Oldenburg”s oversized everyday objects, Arman”s appropriation of the more-than-human object, and Andy Warhol”s pop art; craft and popular imagery. The iconography he uses is a catalog of popular culture, not only American, but global.
His approach is in keeping with the legacy of pop art, appropriating objects and trying to understand “why and how consumer products can be glorified”. Throughout his career, he has used all sorts of popular items, from vacuum cleaners and household appliances enclosed in Plexiglas cases and lit with neon lights, to basketballs suspended in aquariums (with the help of Dr. Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winner in physics), then rococo trinkets, bazaar souvenirs (inflatable rabbits, shepherds or little pigs made of sugar, Michael Jackson made of porcelain), and last but not least, toys and objects closely linked to childhood.
These appropriations led him to be prosecuted and convicted for plagiarism.
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Private life and family
In 1991, Koons married the pornographic actress and politician Ilona Anna Staller, known as La Cicciolina, with whom he produced provocative works (Made in Heaven), particularly pornographic, which made him known to the general public, but which were so unsuccessful with the artistic elite that he thought of destroying his work, which has since been reappraised by critics.
The couple divorced in 1994, two years after the birth of their son Ludwig. The separation was marked by lengthy legal battles, including custody of the child, initially given to Koons and later transferred to the mother. He became involved with the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children and helped establish the Koons Family Institute of International Law and Policy (ICMEC). He was reunited with his daughter Shannon, who was conceived while he was in college and put up for adoption.
In 2002, he married artist Justine Wheeler, who had worked in his studio; they have several children.
In 1999, because of the legal fees incurred to find his son, and the high cost of designing his artworks, he was subjected to a tax reassessment of three million dollars. He also had to part with more than 70 employees. His stock has since risen sharply and he works with patrons who finance each new work, which cost several million dollars to produce.
He owns a home in New York, a family farm in Pennsylvania and a collection of 19th and 20th century art, including paintings by René Magritte, Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet.
He donated $50,000 to Correct the Record (en), a Super PAC that supported Hillary Clinton”s 2016 presidential campaign.
Summary
For some, “he is one of the few to have been able to identify the essence of the avant-garde currents of the century, including pop art”, but it is especially an artist cultivating the kitsch very appreciated by billionaires new rich (he was the favorite artist of American financier Bernard Madoff).
He arrived in the art world with his first works dating from the late 1970s, early 1980s, with the series The News. He arrived after the great movements of the first half of the twentieth century, after minimalism, pop art, or Marcel Duchamp. He became known for his own imagery: popular, kitsch, cold, made from noble materials such as marble or porcelain.
Her production is very heterogeneous, and is constantly between two tensions; she always deals with two opposites, which makes her works both kitsch and unique, popular and erudite, easy and at the same time complex. Her style can be described as neo pop.
He transforms American cultural figures such as Popeye, the Hulk and Michael Jackson. In 1988, he created three identical porcelain sculptures of the latter and his monkey Bubbles, entitled Michael Jackson and Bubbles, as part of his exhibition “Banality (en)”.
Jeff Koons uses several artistic techniques: installation, photography, painting, sculpture on all materials (wood, marble, glass, stainless steel) up to computer-assisted creation, his favorite technique for paintings, which are then shaped on canvas by his assistants.
He says he tries to make art for as many people as possible and always works with an eye toward “dealing with things that everyone can relate to.”
Despite the apparent simplicity of his works, Koons takes great care with them; his Balloon Dogs, for example, reproduce the slightest fold of the balloon. The production time of a sculpture would be nearly three years.
One of his creations, Split-Rocker, is a sculpture made with more than 100 000 flowers. It represents for half a Dino, for half a Pony, both from the imagery of childhood. It was acquired by François Pinault in 2001.
Koons collaborated with BMW and decorated the brand”s 17th art car, an M3 racing in the GT2 class at the 2010 Le Mans 24 Hours. This special decoration, made from a digital print on vinyl covered with two layers of transparent protective film, was unveiled on June 1, 2010 at the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris.
He participated in the creation of the statue for Artpop (singer Lady Gaga”s fourth album), unveiled on November 11, 2013 during ArtRave.
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Collaboration
In 2017, he designed five bags for Louis Vuitton featuring famous paintings – Titian”s Mars, Venus and Cupid, Leonardo da Vinci”s Mona Lisa, Rubens” Tiger Hunt, Fragonard”s Gimblette, and Vincent van Gogh”s Wheat Fields with Cypresses.
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Rating
Michael Jackson and Bubbles was sold at auction at Sotheby”s on May 15, 2001 for a record price of $5.6 million.
Jeff Koons was the most expensive living artist at auction with Balloon Flower (Magenta) sold for £12,921,250 (€16,343,000 with sales fees) by Christie”s in London on June 30, 2008, dethroned a few months later by Lucian Freud, then by David Hockney in 2018. Jeff Koons regains the top spot with a Rabbit sold for $91.1 million at Chistie”s New York on May 17, 2019.
The work entitled Puppy was sold for €29,765,000 according to Paris-Match.
He was ranked 54th artist in auction proceeds for the year 2008.
Koons considers that he is not good as a businessman: “I prefer to think that I am a very good artist.”
In 2014, Jeff Koons was ranked by ArtReview magazine in the top 10 of the “Power 100” (ranking of the 100 most influential people in the contemporary art world). He moves up from 56th place to 7th.
His work One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank was sold at Christie”s at Rockefeller Center in New York City on May 8, 2016 for €13,371,732.
Jeff Koons has been condemned several times for plagiarism: in 1992 for his sculpture String of Puppies (in 1993 for portraying Odie, a Garfield character, in Wild Boy and Puppy; in 2017 for the sculpture Naked (a forgery of the photo entitled Enfants by Jean-François Bauret)….
In 2015, photographer Mitchel Gray filed a complaint for plagiarism of one of his advertising posters.
In 2018, he was accused of plagiarizing an advertisement for the brand Naf Naf. On February 23, 2021, he was definitively condemned for counterfeiting by the Court of Appeal of Paris. According to the ruling, his sculpture entitled “Fait d”hiver” (Winter Fact) was a copy of an advertisement created in 1985 for the clothing brand “Naf-Naf”, the work of photographer Franck Davidovici. The Court of Appeal also denied him the right to invoke the exception of parody, as “Fait d”hiver” does not explicitly constitute a manifestation of humor or mockery. Jeff Koons cannot invoke the freedom of artistic expression either, insofar as this presupposes that the original work is known to the general public and that the latter can therefore understand the reasons for the artistic transformation of the initially commercial visual.
1980”s
1990”s
Year 2000
Year 2010
The American singer Lady Gaga makes a reference to Koons in her song Applause with the following lyrics: “One second I”m a Koons then, suddenly the Koons is me! He also created the sculpture of Lady Gaga that appears on the cover of her album Artpop.
Jeff Koons made a short appearance in the film Harvey Milk, released in 2008. In a black wig, he plays the role of the former mayor of San Francisco Art Agnos.
In his novel La Carte et le Territoire (2010), Michel Houellebecq presents the painter Jed Martin working on a painting that will remain unfinished: Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons sharing the art market.
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External links
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