A trove of valuable artworks covering 500 years of history will be sold in November from what Christie’s auction house described only as a “distinguished private collector.”
That’s a somewhat modest description. The seller is arguably the most famous living artist in the world — Jeff Koons, according to two auction experts with knowledge of the deal who were not authorized to speak officially. The sale will be part of the November marquee auctions in New York.
Over the last few decades, Koons, who is 71, has assembled a small collection of artworks, mostly in his Upper East Side townhouse. He is now selling nine paintings by artists like Picasso, Manet and the Dutch Golden Age painter Cornelis van Haarlem. The collection is estimated to sell above $100 million, according to Christie’s, which declined to publicly identify the consignor.
“It is a vision,” Alex Rotter, Christie’s global president, said of the collection. “It’s not pedestrian.”
Koons declined to comment.
Rotter said that a 1969 Picasso called “Le Baiser” would be the top lot, in the range of $40 million. The picture is emblematic of the artist’s exploration of lovers during the last decade of his life, when his images of intertwined couples seemed to blur the line between passion and violence.
Koons has explored similar themes in his own career. His “Made in Heaven” series from the early 1990s included sexual images of himself and Ilona Staller, the Hungarian model known as Cicciolina. (The pair had a son and were briefly married.) “I was trying to remove all guilt and shame in any form,” he recently told T Magazine about the series.
In 2008, Koons bought the Picasso painting at a Sotheby’s auction for $17.4 million, or $27.1 million in today’s dollars. Three years later, he purchased another Picasso painting from the same series for $10.5 million, or $15.6 million after inflation.
During a 2024 interview with ARTE, a European television channel, Koons expressed his fascination with Picasso’s later works. “I really believe Picasso was at his most generous,” the artist said. “He was this kind of shaman torchbearer, showing us that we can have a richer, better life.”
Koons remains one of the few living artists who is a household name, but his dominance in the market has fallen since its peak at the 2019 auction at Christie’s where his 1986 stainless steel rabbit sculpture sold for $91.1 million. The independent market database ARTDAI estimated that the financial performance of his artworks at auction over the last decade has fallen by nearly 60 percent (it does not include private sales). Koons has also hopped galleries in recent years, leaving David Zwirner and Gagosian in 2021 for Pace Gallery, only to reverse course four years later to rejoin Gagosian.
A person close to the Christie’s deal said that Koons’s motivation for selling the collection was to invest back into his art practice.
The Koons collection is a boon for Christie’s in a fall auction season that has so far seen the most expensive trove of artworks going to its competitor, Sotheby’s. That company recently secured 12 paintings valued at $450 million including works by van Gogh, Cézanne, Pissaro and other Impressionists, from the estate of Carlos Pedro Blaquier and Nelly Blaquier de Arrieta, heirs to an Argentine sugar fortune.
Christie’s has provided a guarantee to Koons for the artworks. The auction, on Nov. 17, is entitled “Heroes and Lovers.”
“Heroes” refers to a 1590 painting by van Haarlem depicting the myth of Hercules and the river god Achelous competing to marry a princess. Koons had bought the artwork in 2008, paying $8.1 million, more than quadruple the high estimate, or $12.6 million today. Christie’s estimated that it would sell for about $12 million this fall.
Koons has directly commented on van Haarlem’s work. In 2015, he adapted another one of the Dutch mannerist’s pictures for his gazing ball paintings. The contemporary artist put a large blue ball in the center of the Dutch artist’s take on the biblical story about the massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem.
Koons said that the gazing ball “represents the vastness of the universe and at the same time the intimacy of right here, right now.”
