It’s hard to believe that Jeff Koons is entering his eighth decade – for one, he looks incredibly youthful, and for another, he is still energetically present at major art events the world over. Last fall, I spotted him in Doha, where he showed up for the multi-day opening of the Qatar Creates Fall/Winter Season. Still trim and perfectly suited (Koons once modeled for a Hugo Boss ad), he showed up at every dinner, chatting away with Qatar Museums Chairperson Sheikha Al Mayassa and MoMA Director Glenn Lowry, then breaking from the festivities to carefully go through the wide-ranging exhibitions opening over several days: one evening I spotted him taking in 500 years of Moroccan art and the next enjoying the sumptuous paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme, snapping image after image on his iPhone: perhaps his next series will reference the Orientalists.
Not many septuagenarians could keep pace with Jeff: he’s always been the Energizer Bunny of the art world. Which is fitting, since his breakthrough work was Rabbit, the 1986 stainless-steel sculpture of an inflatable toy, a cross between Brancusi and Romper Room. I recall being blown away by Rabbit at the 1987 Whitney Biennial, not long after I moved to New York. In 1988 I landed my first major job in the art world, as the founding Managing Editor of a new magazine called Contemporanea, and early on I got to meet Jeff at his downtown studio, a fairly small space with a lot of fishtanks and basketballs (his Total Equilibrium was another star of the Biennial).
For our third issue, we decided to shine a spotlight on this young new artist who had made such a splash; we ended up being the first American art magazine to feature a Koons work on the cover. Of all the porcelain sculptures in the Banality series, which brought Jeff massive stardom when it premiered in November 1988 at Sonnabend Gallery, don’t ask me why we featured this pair of Serpents. Perhaps they were the only ones finished in time for our September issue deadline. In retrospect, I wish we had gotten Michael Jackson and Bubbles, or Pink Panther! When we were on deadline for the article, I got a late night call at home from Jeff, who was in Italy working with the ceramicists who produced the series; he was suddenly very nervous about the story – he didn’t think he was ready for this kind of exposure – and wanted to kill it. I talked him off the ledge, and we were able to go to print. After it came out, he asked for several copies to send to his family.
That fall, his gallery took out a page in magazine to run one of the ads in what is now a famous series that Jeff himself appeared in. It was a rare ad featuring an artist rather than an artwork, and it definitely helped established Jeff as a formidable presence. He’s always been a master at branding.
Over the years, my career intersected with Jeff’s several times. At the Guggenheim Museum, where I was Deputy Director for Communications, I published the catalogue for his Easyfun-Ethereal series, which premiered at our Berlin gallery in 2000. These were Koons’ first paintings; based on collaged elements from ads and magazine, they surprised everyone and revived his fortunes. One of the paintings in the Guggenheim show, Niagara, became the subject of a precedent-setting copyright infringement lawsuit. Jeff won, on the grounds that even though he didn’t get permission to use one of photographic elements, the overall work was “transformative.” That’s a word that sums up Koons’ art.
During the 1990s, Jeff’s studio was on the same block in SoHo as the Guggenheim offices. It was far removed from the small space I had seen a decade earlier – this was a massive loft, on a scale with Warhol’s Factory, and filled with staff artists who were painstakingly producing the giant paintings based on Jeff’s studies. At one point, Lisa Dennison, the Guggenheim’s Chief Curator, brought me to the studio for a sneak peak of Balloon Dog and other works from the Celebration series. The plan was to premiere them at the downtown Guggenheim, which would have been an incredible coup. We announced the show, and designed the catalogue, but ultimately technical challenges, and Koons’ perfectionism, delayed the series and we never showed it.
By then, the artist and the museum were inextricably linked. In 1997, Koons’ monumental, flower-covered Puppy was acquired to stand guard in front of the new Guggenheim Bilbao. Bizarrely, the sculpture figured in a plan by ETA, the Basque Separatist group, to violently disrupt the museum opening. They smuggled a bomb among the flowers being delivered to make the sculpture. The plot was foiled, but one guard was shot and killed in the attack. The incident was a huge shock to all of us at the Guggenheim – in New York and in Bilbao – but ultimately Puppy has proven to be an uplifting symbol and delighted millions of visitors to the museum.
Koons, of course, is one of the most valuable artists in the international market, so it’s no surprised that during my 15 years at Sotheby’s I was called upon to market his work repeatedly. I featured him three times on the cover of the magazine I published (once commissioning Peter Gregoire to do an original shoot in his studio).
But the most memorable event was a panel discussion I orchestrated between Jeff and Diana Picasso (Pablo’s granddaughter) to promote the recent publication of the Zervos catalogue raisonné, a 33-volume marvel that is the best source of truth about Picasso’s paintings and drawings. I didn’t know what to expect, but Jeff spoke brilliantly about Picasso, and it was clear that he had spent a lot of time with the Zervos. It seems fitting to me that his current exhibition, at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, is Reflections: Picasso/Koons, which puts Jeff’s work in dialogue with the greatest artist of the 20th Century. Nice.
Please use the form below or send a message via email, WhatsApp or SMS.
We’d love to hear from you!
Please fill out the form below or send us a message via email, WhatsApp, or SMS.
