Month: October 2026

Jeff Koons work at The Broad, 2025

Christie’s will hold a sale on November 17th called Heroes & Lovers.

From Christie’s:
Heroes & Lovers: Property of a Distinguished Collector unites an extraordinary group of works spanning the Renaissance to the 20th century, placing four paintings by Pablo Picasso and a pastel by Edouard Manet, in conversation with masterpieces by Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem and Tilman Riemenschneider. Across themes of passion, valour, mythology, devotion and the human figure, these works reveal how artists separated by centuries returned to the same enduring questions of beauty, power and love. Together, they offer a compelling exploration of the timeless dialogue that connects the great masters of art history.

Nine Paintings spanning five centuries, estimated at more than $100M, will come from a consigner the auction house declines to name but the New York Times, citing two people with knowledge of the deal, reports that the seller is Jeff Koons. He declined to comment.

The top lot is a 1969 Picasso of intertwined lovers, Le Baiser, estimated at about $40M. He purchased it in 2008 for $17.4M.

This actually isn’t the first time Jeff Koons has parted with a collection — in a profile of him in the NYT Style Magazine a few weeks ago, he told Nick Haramis that during his custody fight over his son in the early 1990s he liquidated everything in his art collection to cover legal fees.

What was arguably the low point of Koons’s life was also a turning point in his career, during which he produced his most impressive and enduring projects. Each was a gleaming shrine to childlike innocence and wonder. “I was trying to make art that my son could look on in the future and would realize I was thinking about him very much during these times,” he told The Guardian in 2009. There was “Puppy” (1992), a massive dog-shaped topiary that can house up to 60,000 flowering plants (“It’s about fertility and giving up control”) and “Celebration” (1994-2019), a series that includes a giant bouquet of mirror-polished stainless-steel tulips (as well as a balloon dog, party hat, hanging heart and Easter egg). He also began construction on a nearly 11,000-pound heap of Play-Doh, made of polychrome aluminum, that would cost a small fortune and take him almost two decades to finish.

He said he hoped his son would one day look at those pieces and understand how much he had been thinking of him.

Tulips at the Wynn Hotel, from a 2015 visit

If you live in, or have visited, the south you may have seen at least two of the Celebration pieces. These are the only ones I can think of on public display. If you can think of others, please LMK.

from a 2014 visit

In  2014, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville announced its purchase of hanging Heart Gold / magenta, a mirror polish steel heart more than nine feet wide and 3000 lbs, suspended from a ceiling of a dining area. It’s one of five unique versions, and Koons sold it to the museum directly.

From a 2025 visit

The Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis has a Smooth Egg with Bow (magenta/violet).

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Sidenote here, but the Dixon puts on such really terrific exhibits — two of my faves have been

The Isabelle de Borchgrave: Fashioning Art from Paper (above) exhibit in 2017, and (below) Chris Antmann: An Occasional Craving, in 2025

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Last summer, we got to some many other Koons pieces, including some Celebration, at the Broad in LA:

Tulips

Balloon Dog

Rabbit (Rabbit is actually from the Statuary collection)

Michael Jackson and Bubbles, porcelain, from the Banality series

The Winslow Homer: Painter, Etcher exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art closes October 18th and I’m so glad that Shugie, Brent, and I got to visit this summer. The people there are so nice and while we got to the museum shortly before they closed for the day, they welcomed us in with no hurry and were really kind.

The exhibit sets Homer’s etchings by the paintings they grew from and treats them in their own right, not just footnotes to the oils.

The Noon Recess

Ralph Blumenthal wrote the NYT article that came out this week; it’s
Jamie Wyeth, Meet Uncle Winslow
Jamie Wyeth makes a pilgrimage to Portland, Maine, to view rare works by Winslow Homer, who has been a potent influence on three generations of Wyeth artists.

Jamie is now 80. From the MFA – Boston:
Jamie Wyeth has followed a unique path, training with his aunt Carolyn after leaving school at age 11, studying anatomy in a New York City morgue and working in Andy Warhol’s New York studio, The Factory.

Jamie Wyeth’s Andy Warhol, from my visit to Cheekwood in Nashville earlier this year

and this is Andy Warhol’s Jamie Wyeth, from (no surprise) the same visit to Cheekwood:

His father Andrew Wyeth was incredibly well-known — this page at MOMA discusses his famous Christina’s World. And Andrew’s father, thus Jamie’s grandfather, was N.C. Wyeth, the painter-illustrator-muralist whose work appeared in RLS’ Treasure Island.

Andrew Wyeth, Man from Maine on view at the Birmigham Museum of Art from a 2023 visit

In the article, Jamie Wyeth describes Winslow Homer as something like a family uncle, a presence in the Wyeth household across three generations. N.C. Wyeth named his Port Clyde homestead “Eight Bells”  after one of Homer’s seascapes.  Even though N.C. and Homer didn’t know each other, this influence carried through the family. He says N.C. spoke of Homer often, that there was almost a ‘spiritual connection’ and that he “simply stole from him early on.” Even a review of a N.C. Wyeth 1937 exhibit asserted the comparisons with Homer and John Singer Sargent.

Homer lived and worked in a studio in on the coast of Maine from 1884 until his death in 1910, so it’s only right that the Portland Museum of Art have so many of his works and celebrate him with this exhibit. In 2006, they actually purchased that studio and spent years renovating it. It’s open for tours.

Hark! The Lark

From the NYT article:

He stopped at another haunting series of paintings and etchings called both “Hark! The Lark” and “A Voice From the Cliffs” depicting three stalwart women by the sea mesmerized by a haunting cry.

Wyeth wondered, “What the hell are they hearing?”

Homer’s rugged outdoor scenes, often painted indoors, became a wilderness template, influencing the outfitting giant L.L. Bean, according to Bessire, the museum director.

That reminded Wyeth of a story. Linda Bean, a granddaughter of the founder, was one of the Wyeths’ biggest fans, Wyeth said, buying many of their works, some of which were destroyed when her gallery in Port Clyde went up in flames in 2023. Linda, who died of cancer at 82 in 2024, also amassed a large collection of Wyeth memorabilia. Once she summoned a doctor to her bedside, only to flabbergast him with the announcement, “This is the bed Andrew was conceived in!”

The Life Line

Jamie Wyeth says that Homer is even still an influence; that after painting a small landscape not too long ago that he looked at and thought he could see a resemblance between it and “Fox Hunt”.