Jeff Koons as a Collector: Picasso, Manet and His Christie’s Collection
Christie’s is presenting nine works estimated at around $100 million from a “Distinguished Collector”. Several media outlets have identified Jeff Koons as the owner. Picasso, Manet and Old Masters reveal a less familiar side of his work and his eye as a collector.
Jeff Koons as a Collector: Picasso, Manet and the Old Masters Behind the Contemporary Artist
Christie’s has announced Heroes and Lovers, a group of nine works estimated at around $100 million and spanning nearly five centuries of art history.
Officially, the auction house refers only to a “Distinguished Collector”. But several US media outlets have since identified the owner as Jeff Koons.
And that is precisely what makes this sale interesting.
Because behind one of the most famous contemporary artists in the world, we discover a collector whose choices shed a fairly clear light on his own work.
Four Picassos, a Manet, a spectacular Cornelis van Haarlem, a Gothic sculpture by Tilman Riemenschneider, as well as works by François Le Moyne and Fragonard: this is quite far from the collection one might automatically expect from a contemporary art superstar.
But once you know Koons, the whole selection starts to make sense.
Picasso and Desire
The main work in the sale will be Picasso’s Le Baiser, painted in 1969 and estimated at around $40 million.
Koons acquired the painting at Sotheby’s in 2008 for $17.4 million.
The work is frontal, physical, almost brutal. Two faces fill almost the entire surface of the painting in an embrace that is anything but sentimental.
It is difficult not to recognize some of Koons’s own long-standing concerns here: desire, the body, sexuality, but also the desire to create an image that is immediately readable and impossible to ignore.
Another Picasso from the collection, Tête de femme (Dora Maar), introduces a different but equally strong dimension: the relationship between the artist, the model and the transformation of a real person into an iconic image.
These are not simply four Picassos bought because one is supposed to own Picasso.
The works chosen correspond quite closely to the obsessions of the person who owns them.
Manet, the Old Masters and Koons’s Relationship with Art History
The presence of Manet is even more revealing.
Koons has never hidden his interest in art history. In his Gazing Ball Paintings series, he directly revisited works by Manet, Titian, El Greco, Courbet, Leonardo da Vinci and others, placing his famous blue reflective spheres in front of reproduced masterpieces.
The idea was not simply to quote the Old Masters.
Koons wanted the viewer to enter physically into art history, with their own reflection becoming part of an image that might be several centuries old.
His personal collection shows that this dialogue was not limited to his public work.
He also lived with these works.
The Manet included in the Christie’s sale belongs precisely to this territory where the body, intimacy and the modernity of the image become central.
And when the same collection also includes a monumental Mannerist painting by Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem depicting Hercules fighting Achelous, or a sculpture by Tilman Riemenschneider from the early sixteenth century, it becomes clear that Koons’s relationship with older art goes far beyond a few scholarly references inserted into his own work.
A Cornelis van Haarlem Bought Against the Market
The story of Hercules and Achelous is particularly interesting.
When the work appeared at Christie’s in 2008, it was estimated at between $1 million and $1.5 million.
It eventually sold for $8.1 million.
More than four times its high estimate, and a world auction record for the artist that still stands today.
Koons was therefore prepared to pay far beyond market expectations to secure a work he genuinely wanted.
That detail probably tells us more about him as a collector than many theoretical discussions ever could.
A collector can study estimates, previous auction results and all the available references. At some point, however, they still have to decide what the work is worth to them.
Koons decided.
The painting was later loaned for several years to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Collecting the Way He Creates
In 2015, when discussing his personal collection, Koons explained that he collected much in the same way he made his own work: by following his intuition and responding to objects that produced a strong sensation or intellectual stimulation.
That probably explains Heroes and Lovers better than its $100 million estimate.
The collection moves across centuries without trying to achieve perfect academic coherence. What connects the works are much more human themes: desire, violence, beauty, the body, heroism and sensuality.
In other words, exactly the territory Koons has been working in for decades.
This sale therefore allows us to look at his work from a slightly different angle.
Behind the Balloon Dogs, the reflective surfaces and the imagery of popular culture is also an artist deeply interested in Picasso, Manet, Mannerism, Gothic sculpture and the major narratives of art history.
It is probably no coincidence that his work has always mixed popular objects, desire, mythology and classical references.
Jeff Koons’s private collection does not explain his work entirely.
But it does help us understand a little better where his eye comes from.