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).
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
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