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I love to read about artists who collect. Most, of course, don’t have much money to collect, between paying the rent of their studios and hustling, but when they do, they tend towards art works of old and modern masters, such as Schnabel’s penchant for Picasso and Koons’ for 16th century German sculpture, as the article below highlights.
Do they know something we don’t?
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Jeff Koons’s taste for the classics
By Paul Jeromack and Jason Edward Kaufman | Posted: 28.2.08
NEW YORK. Jeff Koons, the artist known for his kitsch sculptures inspired by pop imagery, has emerged as a major spender on traditional masters. Last month, Koons paid $6.3m at Sotheby’s in New York for a large limewood carving of St Catherine, dating from around 1505, by the great German 16th-century sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider (p63).
He had previously been identified by The New Yorker as the lender of an 1866 Gustave Courbet nude to the Metropolitan Museum’s current exhibition on the French artist. He acquired this at Sotheby’s London on 27 June 2007 for £1.64m ($3.2m).
Koons currently holds the record for the most expensive living artist: his nine-foot suspended Hanging Heart sold for $23.6m to his dealer Larry Gagosian at Sotheby’s New York in November.
In a lecture delivered at the 92nd Street Y community centre in New York last month, Koons professed his affinity for Courbet, comparing works from his “Made in Heaven” series—which show him having sex with his former wife, the Hungarian-born Ilona Staller, a former porn star and then MP in Italy—with Courbet’s l’Origine du Monde (1866) in the Musée d’Orsay.
Koons told the audience that while his own work is based on balloon rabbits, porcelain figurines and flower puppies, he collects older art, including a Dalí gouache that he bought as a memento of his visit to the Catalan artist at New York’s St Regis hotel in the early 1970s.
©2008 The Art Newspaper
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