By RANDY KENNEDY
Over the last several months Jeff Koons, 55, who has always been a polarizing artist, has been at work in a role he has never assumed during his three-decade career, that of curator of other people’s art. Last summer he accepted an invitation by the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York to organize an exhibition of works from the important collection of the Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou, a collection in which Mr. Koons’s own work plays a pivotal part.
That fact - along with Mr. Joannou’s close friendship with Mr. Koons and Mr. Joannou’s role as a trustee at the New Museum, though he is not underwriting the show or providing input - has caused some people, even in the insular contemporary-art world, to worry that the arrangement is too clubby.
This was part of Mr. Koons’s motivation to speak in detail for the first time about his life as a collector of art, not just as a creator of it. He decided to engage with it as a way to demonstrate his deep, idiosyncratic engagement with the history of art (mostly Western) and history’s very literal role in many of his new paintings. He said he wanted to make the case that, for many years now, he has viewed creating art and thinking about the works of art he loves as increasingly inseparable activities. “Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does,” he said. “I’m always looking for source material.”
Mr. Koons wants to do well by the New Museum, which gave him his first solo exhibition in 1980, and by Mr. Joannou, whose collection is influential and widely admired. But as someone confident enough in his younger years to proclaim that he was picking up the mantle of Duchamp and Picasso and “taking us out of the 20th century” with his own work, Mr. Koons also wants to prove himself worthy of joining the ranks of well-known artists who have turned their talents successfully to organizing shows .
As he walks around his buzzing studio, his source material often blares out these days. Images of Roman marbles, mostly female nudes, peek out of his paintings. Dali motifs abound. Warhol and the Venus of Willendorf and Roy Lichtenstein share unlikely quarters in other paintings. A strange stone carving in the shape of a vagina, probably part of a Celtic fertility figure, that Mr. Koons recently came across on the Internet and bought (“I love to just look around on the computer after the kids go to bed”) was the centerpiece of another work in progress .
But the art-historical dots that Mr. Koons connects in his own thinking about such works are plentiful to the point of teeming, and harder to see. The form of an inflatable lobster can simultaneously name-check Duchamp, Dali and H.C. Westermann, the eccentric Chicago sculptor. A Dali motif appearing in the new paintings, the image of a draped cloth from a 1969 work that Mr. Koons owns, leads him back to a painting he says he believes was the clear model for the cloth, “Venus Rising From the Sea - a Deception,” by Raphaelle Peale, America’s first notable still life painter , which leads him forward again to Dali’s last painting, “The Swallow’s Tail” from 1983, in which Mr. Koons said he can discern the form again, all but hidden.
Mr. Koons has collected since the beginning of his life as a professional artist . His choices are stylistically and historically diverse but tend to share a preoccupation with the body and sexuality, which is also a major theme in Mr. Joannou’s collection .
What drew him to the Courbet bull, which he bought at a Sotheby’s auction in 2007, one of four paintings he owns by that artist? “I like this type of work,” he said simply about the Courbet, then pointed to a brown patch on the bull’s fur and explained that he stares at the patch often and wonders whether it might represent “some form of, you know, soul or really a personal part” of Courbet’s own being. Looking at a Manet nude, he talks about his appreciation for the “lack of violence” in Manet’s work and refers on separate occasions to a crease in the nude’s stomach, which he believes resembles a long-tailed sperm.
Standing in his studio next to an image of a radiant Poussin from his collection , he said, “When I view the world, I don’t think of my own work. I think of my hope that, through art, people can get a sense of the type of invisible fabric that holds us all together, that holds the world together.”
