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Made in Heaven Series
Having become an art star, Koons turned
next to film, and decided that the quickest way to become a film star
was to make a sex film. This led him to meet and marry the Italian sex
symbol La Cicciolina (Hungarian-born naturalized-Italian Ilona Staller),
who subsequently appeared in much of his Made in Heaven work, including
paintings, glass sculptures and large colour photographs of herself and
Koons in sexually explicit poses. Hugely controversial, its admirers see
the series as his greatest work, confronting issues of guilt and shame
in a similar way to the Renaissance masterpiece Adam and Eve's Expulsion
From the Garden of Eden (1426-7, Brancacci Chapel) by Masaccio.
In 1991 Koons and Staller married, and the following year had a son, Ludwig,
but the marriage ended soon afterward. After agreeing to joint custody,
Staller absconded to Italy with the child. Koons later destroyed much
of his Made in Heaven work during the custody battle.
Celebration Series
This set of work began when Ludwig was
born in 1992, and focused on the shapes and colours of the baby's first
toys - the sort of art that a small child could relate to. The idea was
to make huge reproductions of easter eggs, valentine hearts, balloon animals
and other joyful images in brightly coloured metal. Unfortunately, many
works ended up taking longer and being far more costly to produce than
planned. Luckily, in 1992, Koons was commissioned to produce a piece of
work for a German art exhibition in Bad Arolsen. Koons duly made one of
his most popular works, Puppy, a forty-three feet high sculpture
of a West Highland White Terrier puppy made out of flowers arranged on
a skeletal steel structure. It was bought by the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Foundation in 1997 and installed outside the Guggenheim
Museum Bilbao.
An exact duplicate was made for the Connecticut estate of the multi-millionaire
businessman Peter Brant.
The Celebration series also included
several 9-feet tall highly polished steel hearts, painted in different
colours. In 2007, a magenta-coloured version (Hanging Heart) sold at Sotheby's
for $23 million, a world auction record at the time for a living artist.
Other sculptures from the Celebration series were shown in public
in 2008, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York..
Koons' Celebration Series eventually
appeared in several of the best art museums around the world, where it
enhanced his reputation as a crowd-puller if not the next Michelangelo.
Latest Exhibitions
In 2008, seventeen sculptures by Jeff Koons
were exhibited at the Chateau de Versailles, the chateau's first major
show devoted to an American contemporary artist. In the same year he had
a retrospective at the Chicago Art Institute, and a major exhibition at
Berlins's Neue Nationalgalerie. In 2009, Koons had his first major solo
exhibition in London, at the Serpentine Gallery. The exhibition showcased
his new Popeye Series, a set of metal sculptures of inflatable
toys. They included dolphins, lobsters and others, cast in aluminum, together
with realist paintings of Popeye smoking his pipe, with a red lobster
hovering over his head. Meantime, following the donation of a number of
Koons works by his former dealer Anthony d'Offay, the Tate Modern has
opened a special room dedicated to the artist.
Jeff Koons - Postmodernist Artist or
Showman?
Differences of opinion about Koons' worth
as an artist essentially revolve around differences in the meaning
of art. Traditional art theory places great importance on the craftsmanship
disclosed by an objective work of art - like a beautiful painting or a
wonderfully realistic sculpture. Furthernore, purists consider that only
certain subjects are worthy of artistic representation. Using these criteria,
critics point to the lack of craftsmanship in Koons' works, and the fact
that a lot of the work was performed by assistants. What's more, his subjects
are uniformly low-brow - too low-brow to be "artistic. His admirers,
on the other hand, point to his popularity among the general public, his
high regard among museums, and his bank balance, and say something like:
it may not be art, but people like it. See also: American
Sculptors.
The debate continues.
Works by Jeff Koons and other postmodernists
like Damien Hirst (b.1965) and Tracey
Emin (b.1963) can be seen in many of the best
art museums throughout the world.
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