WORLD FAMOUS ARTIST JEFF KOONS WILL LOAN 3 OLD MASTER PAINTINGS FOR THE PARIS TABLEAU FROM 4 TO 8 NOVEMBER AT PARIS BOURSE.
Normally people lend artworks to museums all the time and very little fuss is made as no body cares who is the actual owner and even if his name is mentioned, it does not ring a bell among the masses. After all, owners of Old Masters tend be as old as the hills themselves!
Jeff Koons of course is a different kettle of fish. First he is very much alive as he is only 56. Second he is the world's MOST handsome, gorgeous and sexy living artist as most artists look like something the cat dragged in with matted hair, scruffy clothes, unkempt beard and probably smell too. While artists tend to paint or sculpt themselves as a one-man show, Jeff Koons has a studio employing anything from 60 to 100 artists all slogging for him ala factory conveyor belt style.
Jeff Koons tend to be immaculately garbed and when he is not, he is probably naked having sex with his wife or something like that. If you think he looks dishy now, imagine how he looked like at 25 or 35! He tends to be mistaken for a movie star for all the right reasons.
I have always admired him so of course I am gushing like a geyser. Call me Old Faithful as in the geyser in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA. Not old as in my age.
Oh, he is also famous for marrying a porn star. You know, like in blur films that you watch on your PC during lunch hour and with doors locked. His wife was not outed after marriage or accidentally found to act in porn movies like Prince Andrew's old flame Koo Stark who appeared in soft porn.
She was already famous as a porn star when he married her, for all the right reasons as the worldwide publicity only increased the value of his artworks and controversy that does not involve jail term or death on the electric chair can only improve sales. You must have read about him and his bride Ilona Staller, orginally from Hungary but became naturalised Italian who was also called Cicciolina (which means 'cuddles' in Italian). Incredibly despite or because of her infamy, she was elected as MP in the Italian Parliament for 5 long years from 1987 to 1992.
Jeff Koons married her in 1991 and she continued to appear in hardcore porn even while in office. She remains famous today for attracting vast numbers of listeners to her political speeches. Perhaps her tendency to expose one breast while speaking may have something to do with it.
Jeff Koons, sensing a golden or should it be blue, opportunity, started creating a series of sculptures and photographs of them having sex in many exotic and unusual positions, in various places and even in different costumes for added interest though you would have thought being naked and undressed were more like it. These artworks were exhibited under the apt title 'Made in Heaven' as I am sure both went there and back while doing what came naturally. They divorced not so amicably in 1998 and have a son Ludwig.
She offered to have sex with Saddam Hussein and Osama ben Laden provided they laid down arms but for some reason these two guys did not take up her offer. If I were those two, I would and then continue to take up arms. As it is, both men are now dead. So if Ms Staller offers to have sex with you, please do so as you might die soon after so you should get something out of it at least.
Jeff Koons is not your usual portraitist. Some critics accuse him of shameless marketing and branding as he was the first artist to hire an image consultant and durin interviews, referred to himself in the third person! Cool or what? His works have been accused of being killer kitsch, crass, self-pandering, ridiculous, cartoonish and worse, imitating Andy Warhol!
Still, his works command huge prices like Damien Hirst who is 46 but looks like Jeff Koons' father. His 'Magenta Balloon Flower' sold for a staggering RM 85 million in 2008 which proves he is a pioneer and genius. He holds one world record price for a living artist.
For someone into modern works, Pop art, cartoon surrealism and sex, Jeff Koons collects Old Masters but obviously his Old Masters do not consist of flowers, landscapes, animals or smirking portraits of lords and ladies. Yes, his Old Masters are all about naked women or nearly nude damsels sprawling all over the place...
And yes, Koons is his real surname too! So waht if it rhymes with cartoons.
First International Art Fair Dedicated to Old Master Paintings
World-renowned American contemporary artist Jeff Koons is lending three Old Master paintings to Paris Tableau, the first international art fair dedicated to Old Master paintings, from 4 to 8 November 2011 at the Palais de la Bourse, Paris. This major new event was devised by ten leading Parisian paintings dealers who invited ten important international colleagues from London, Amsterdam, Zurich, Rome, Madrid and New York to join them.
Jupiter and Antiope or Venus and Satyr by Nicolas Poussin (1584-1665), Young girl holding two puppies by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) and Femme nue or Woman with a Parrot by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) are the three alluring works that were selected from Jeff Koons’ collection to show in Paris.
Like many avant-garde artists, Koons aspires to emulate the standards of the Old Masters and has always deeply engaged with the history of art. Born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1955, he painted copies of Old Masters and sold them in his father’s furniture store before studying art at Baltimore and Chicago. He has collected throughout his professional life and, while he has always bought the work of high-profile contemporary artists, more recently he has focused on Old Master and 19th century works. As with these three ravishing paintings, many of the works in Koons’ collection share a preoccupation with the female body and sexuality which is often seen in his own work.
Poussin’s Jupiter and Antiope or Venus and Satyr is virtually unknown and unseen for over a century. The great connoisseur G. F. Waagen described it as ‘an excellent picture by Nicolas Poussin’ in his Treasures of Art in Great Britain in 1854, and it was exhibited in a celebrated exhibition in Manchester three years later. It is Poussin at his most seductive and openly carnal. A nude woman reclines in the woods at the base of a tree, her arm covering her eyes. A naked horned satyr, who has stumbled upon the sleeping beauty, turns around to silence Cupid who approaches preparing to shoot Love’s dart. Most of the scene is cast in deep roseate shadows with only a single, strong ray of light illuminating the focus of inspiration and imagination, her opened legs.
Fragonard’s Young girl holding two puppies was first recorded in the collection of the king’s printer, Louis François Prault (1734-1806) and was sold at auction in Paris with its pendant on 27 November 1780. Prault owned six paintings by Fragonard, all oval and executed around 1770. Throughout the 1770s Fragonard made something of a specialty of painting beautiful, scantily clad young women fondling or playing with pet animals. This painting, in which the young girl fixes the observer firmly with her gaze while cuddling the two puppies to her flirtatiously exposed breasts, possesses a gentle and somewhat ambivalent sensuality. The work is irresistibly characterised by the fluent brushwork, a dancing sense of movement and the opalescent colouring that Fragonard had fully mastered by this time.
Painted at the height of Courbet’s artistic powers, Femme nue belongs to the series of major, and at the time, controversial nude paintings he executed in 1865-66, including Femme au perroquet, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, for which Femme nue is a finished and signed study; Le Sommeil in the Musée du Petit Palais, Paris; and, most famously, L’Origine du monde in The Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Femme nue, the last great Courbet nude from this period still in private hands, was painted at the moment when his superb portraits and sensual, life-size paintings of nudes were finally beginning to win popular success. Eccentrically posed, with her head thrown back and her wavy brown hair spilling over the lower corner of the composition, the young model has an extraordinary physical presence. Heightened by Courbet’s dramatic lighting and his flair for rendering human flesh, the girl’s half smile, faint blush and Siren pose seduce the observer. The model was almost certainly Jo Hifferman, a young Irish girl who was the model and mistress of the American-born British-based artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), whose beauty and thick, wavy and lustrous red hair Courbet greatly admired.
These three captivating paintings will undoubtedly be an alluring attraction to Paris Tableau, a new event which promises to be an important addition to the vibrant art scene this autumn.
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Event: Paris Tableau, www.paristableau.com
Dates: 4 to 8 November 2011
Organised by: SAS dix Marchands de Tableaux anciens à Paris, Président: Maurizio Canesso
Location: Palais de la Bourse, Place de la Bourse, Paris 2e, France
Opening hours: 4 to 8 November 12 noon to 8pm, 7 November open until 10pm
Admission: €15 (includes one catalogue)
How to get there: Metro: Bourse (Line 3, Pont de Levallois/Gallieni), Parking: Place de la Bourse
Summary: At the heart of Europe, Paris is a cultural capital with an incomparable heritage and one of the major centres of the art market. For this first fair, twenty prestigious galleries from Paris, Rome, Madrid, London, Zurich, Amsterdam and New York will gather together in the renowned Palais de la Bourse, the former temple of finance.
This is the first event to be entirely dedicated to Old Master paintings dating from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, with artists such as Brueghel the Elder, Jacopo Bassano, François Clouet, Horace Vernet and Canaletto. A convivial fair with a T-shaped plan where each exhibitor has a 35 square metre stand, Paris Tableau is organised chronologically and according to schools. It will allow collectors and curators to appreciate splendid paintings, some of which are exhibited for the first time, and give art lovers the opportunity to meet and share their passion with art dealers.
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