Jeff Koons

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Lore & Background

Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania, to Henry Koons, a furniture dealer and interior decorator, and Gloria J. Koons, a seamstress. As a child, he sold gift-wrapping paper and candy door-to-door after school. As a teenager, he revered Salvador Dalí so much that he visited him at the St. Regis New York. He studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore before transferring to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied from 1975 to 1976. While a student, he met artist Ed Paschke, for whom he worked as a studio assistant in the late 1970s. After college, Koons moved to New York in 1977 and worked at the membership desk of the Museum of Modern Art while establishing himself as an artist. During this time, he dyed his hair red and often wore a pencil mustache, after Salvador Dalí. In 1980, he became licensed to sell mutual funds and stocks and began working as a Wall Street commodities broker at First Investors Corporation, later at Clayton Brokerage Company and then Smith Barney. Following his graduation from the Art Institute in Chicago in 1976, Koons moved away from creating representations of his personal fantasies and began to explore objective art, commerce, and politics. He rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a newly media-saturated era with his Pre-new The New series. With recognition came the establishment of a factory-like studio located in a loft at the corner of Houston Street and Broadway in New York in SoHo, staffed with over 30 assistants, each assigned to a different aspect of producing his work—in a similar mode as Andy Warhol's Factory. Until 2019, Koons had a 1,500 m2 studio factory near the old Hudson rail yards in Chelsea employing 90 to 120 assistants to produce his work. More recently, he downsized staffing and shifted to more automated forms of production, using technology to create his artistic references on computers and implementing a color-by-numbers system so that each assistant could execute his canvases and sculptures as if done by a single hand. Throughout his career, he has consistently explored themes such as consumerist behavior, seduction, banality, and childhood. Koons first began experimenting with the use of ready-made objects and modes of display in his apartment in 1976. Between 1977 and 1979 he produced four separate artworks, which he later referred to as Early Works. In 1978 he began working on his Inflatables series, consisting of inflatable flowers and a rabbit of various heights and colors, positioned along with mirrors. His early series include The Pre-New (domestic objects attached to light fixtures), The New (vacuum-cleaners in illuminated Perspex boxes), and The Equilibrium Series (1983), consisting of one to three basketballs floating in distilled water, a project researched with the help of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. In 1986, Koons introduced the Statuary series, which included transforming an inflatable rabbit into a highly polished stainless-steel piece, leading to his iconic work Rabbit (1986). There are three identical versions of Rabbit; one version was previously part of art collector Stefan Edlis's personal collection but now resides as a gift at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, another in The Broad Museum in Los Angeles. On May 15, 2019, the third version sold at Christie's Auction House for US$80 million, which after including auctioneer's fees reached a final sale price of US$91,075,000, setting a record for most expensive piece sold by a living artist.

Reader's Guide

Jeff Koons occupies a central and contentious position in late 20th- and early 21st-century art. His work, which often transforms everyday objects—such as balloon animals, vacuum cleaners, and basketballs—into highly polished stainless-steel or other fabricated forms, directly engages with themes of consumerism, banality, and childhood. By employing a factory-like studio with numerous assistants and a color-by-numbers system, Koons aligns his production methods with those of industrial manufacturing and earlier artists like Andy Warhol. His series, including The New, Equilibrium, and Statuary, consistently blur boundaries between high art and commercial display, often presenting objects in showroom-like settings. The critical reception of Koons remains sharply divided: some view his work as pioneering and of major art-historical importance, while others dismiss it as kitsch, crass, and based on cynical self-merchandising. Koons himself has stated that there are no hidden meanings or critiques in his works. His market significance is underscored by record auction prices, including US$58.4 million for Balloon Dog (Orange) in 2013 and US$91.1 million for Rabbit in 2019, both records for a living artist at the time. His legacy lies in his ability to provoke debate about the nature of art, value, and taste in a media-saturated era.

Did You Know?

• As a teenager, Koons revered Salvador Dalí so much that he visited him at the St. Regis New York.
• Koons worked as a Wall Street commodities broker at First Investors Corporation, Clayton Brokerage Company, and Smith Barney after becoming licensed to sell mutual funds and stocks in 1980.
• For his Equilibrium Series (1983), Koons researched how to suspend basketballs in distilled water with the help of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.
• Until 2019, Koons had a 1,500 m2 studio factory near the old Hudson rail yards in Chelsea employing 90 to 120 assistants.
• The third version of Rabbit sold at Christie's in 2019 for US$91,075,000, setting a record for the most expensive piece sold by a living artist.