Jeff Koons Appears to Be Selling $100 Million of Picassos and Old Masters at Christie’s

Jeff Koons once put Lady Gaga in front of Botticelli and Bernini for the cover of Artpop. Now the Picassos and old masters in his own collection are headed to auction. Christie’s is offering nine works, estimated at more than $100 million in total, under the title “Heroes & Lovers.” The house hasn’t named the seller, but two industry sources told the New York Times it’s Koons, per ARTnews.

Christie’s declined to comment to ARTnews. The Times reports that Koons plans to pour the proceeds back into his own famously resource-hungry practice, and that the house has guaranteed him a minimum price.

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The headliner is Picasso’s Le Baiser (1969), a gray-toned painting of two lovers locked in a kiss, estimated at about $40 million. Koons bought it at Sotheby’s in 2008 for $17.4 million. Four Picassos in all are in the sale, along with a Manet pastel, a 1590 painting of Hercules by Cornelis van Haarlem and a sculpture by Tilman Riemenschneider. Hypebeast notes that the nine read like a Koons reference library: Manet’s Femme au tub echoes his 1988 sculpture Woman in Tub, and the Times points out that he based one of his Gazing Ball paintings on a canvas by van Haarlem.

For music fans the instinct isn’t new. Koons made the Artpop cover, unveiled in October 2013: a nude sculpture of Gaga with a blue gazing ball, set against a collage that includes fragments of Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, according to Wikipedia.

The sale also lands with Koons’s own market cooler than its peak. His stainless-steel Rabbit made $91.1 million at Christie’s in 2019, a record for a living artist then, but his auction results have slid since, ARTnews notes. He has pushed back on the idea that money drives his work.

The value in art is in how we transcend. It’s a joy. But that got misrepresented and connected to financial aspects which had nothing to do with my intentions.

Jeff Koons, in an interview with Prospect, Prospect

Seven of the works go on the block at Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale in New York on Nov. 17; the two Old Masters join Classic Week in 2027. Before then, key pieces tour Hong Kong, London, Paris and Taipei, then go on view at Christie’s Rockefeller Center headquarters, Galerie reports.