40 Fun Facts About Jeff Koons

Which Jeff Koons sculpture sold for $91.1 million in 2019, an auction record for a living artist?

Rabbit is a mirror-bright steel cast of an inflatable toy, and two of its three copies were first sold for just $40,000 each.

Which pop star did Jeff Koons portray in gilded porcelain with a pet chimpanzee on his lap?

Michael Jackson appears life-size with his chimp Bubbles, in a pose Koons adapted from a press photo. One of the three copies sold for $5.6 million in 2001.

Jeff Koons made a sculpture of which pop star for the cover of her 2013 album Artpop?

Lady Gaga recruited Koons in 2013, three years after meeting him at a Metropolitan Museum of Art fashion event where she performed.

Jeff Koons's flower-covered Puppy has stood since 1997 outside which Spanish museum?

Guggenheim Bilbao was not the first home of Puppy: Koons made it in 1992 for a castle in Germany, and it was rebuilt beside Sydney Harbour before the museum's foundation bought it.

A 2023 Miami art fair visitor shattered a $42,000 porcelain copy of which Jeff Koons sculpture?

Balloon Dog fell off its pedestal and shattered on the floor of the fair. A full-size orange steel version had sold for $58.4 million in 2013.

An inflatable Jeff Koons sculpture over 50 feet tall flew in which annual American event in 2007?

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade turned one of his polished steel pieces back into a soft toy, and the giant later went on show in a Toronto shopping mall.

In 2024, a SpaceX rocket carried 125 miniature Jeff Koons sculptures toward which destination?

The Moon received them aboard a private lander that touched down on February 22, 2024. Each sculpture is about an inch across and named after a historical figure.

In 1997, militants trying to hide explosives beside Jeff Koons's Puppy posed as which kind of workers?

Gardeners was the disguise, and their flowerpots held explosives meant for the museum's opening. The policeman who stopped them was shot dead, and the square where Puppy stands now bears his name.

Adult film star Cicciolina held which public office in Italy when she married Jeff Koons in 1991?

Member of parliament was her job from 1987 to 1992, after she won a seat with about 20,000 votes. She and Koons posed together for his explicit Made in Heaven series.

Before his art sold for millions, Jeff Koons worked on Wall Street in the 1980s in which job?

Commodities broker was his day job at firms including Clayton Brokerage and Smith Barney, and in 1980 he was licensed to sell mutual funds and stocks.

Jeff Koons's early series The New displayed which household appliances in illuminated plastic boxes?

Vacuum cleaners stood in the cases like showroom goods, and Koons first showed them in the window of New York's New Museum in 1980.

Which famous artist did the teenage Jeff Koons admire enough to visit him at a New York hotel?

Salvador Dalí left such a mark that Koons, on moving to the city a few years later, dyed his hair red and wore a pencil mustache in the painter's style.

After moving to New York in 1977, Jeff Koons worked at the membership desk of which institution?

Museum of Modern Art memberships paid his bills while he made his first works, inflatable toy flowers set against mirrors.

At nine, Jeff Koons had his copies of old masters shown in the window of which family business?

A furniture store run by his father, who was also an interior decorator, showed the signed copies to draw in passers-by. His mother was a seamstress.

Which famous scientist helped Jeff Koons work out how to suspend basketballs in tanks of water?

Richard Feynman, a Nobel-winning physicist, advised on the tanks. A layer of salt water beneath fresh water holds each ball in the middle, until vibrations mix the two and it sinks.

Jeff Koons's Puppy, a giant sculpture planted with living flowers, takes the shape of which breed?

West Highland terrier is the breed, grown from marigolds, begonias, petunias and other blooms. Koons wanted to communicate warmth and love after an earlier series caused an uproar.

Jeff Koons's assistant-filled studio is often compared to the Factory of which earlier Pop artist?

Andy Warhol's Factory was the model for a SoHo loft where more than 30 assistants each handled one stage of a Koons work. A later Chelsea studio employed up to 120.

Which carmaker's Art Car series includes a Jeff Koons design that raced at Le Mans in 2010?

BMW gave him an M3 to turn into the seventeenth Art Car, in a series Alexander Calder began in 1975.

Which fashion house put Old Master paintings chosen by Jeff Koons on its 2017 handbags?

Louis Vuitton priced the range from $585 for a key chain to $4,000 for a large carryall, with works by Leonardo da Vinci, Titian and Van Gogh among those reproduced.

Which French royal palace hosted a 2008 Jeff Koons exhibition that drew protesters to its gates?

Versailles held 17 of his sculptures, in the first major show the palace had given a contemporary American artist.

Jeff Koons gave Bouquet of Tulips to which city in memory of victims of terrorist attacks in 2015?

Paris waited three years for it: the first site chosen could not bear the sculpture's weight, and critics attacked the gift before it was unveiled near the Petit Palais in 2019.

The giant hand in Jeff Koons's memorial Bouquet of Tulips is modeled on which famous monument?

Statue of Liberty was the model for the giant hand, whose bouquet holds 11 flowers rather than a dozen: the missing one stands for those who died.

Jeff Koons's flowered Split-Rocker joins half a toy pony's head to half the head of which other toy?

Dinosaur meets pony in a 37-foot head planted with live flowers. The pony half copies a toy rocker that belonged to one of Koons's sons.

Casino mogul Steve Wynn paid $28 million for a Jeff Koons sculpture of which cartoon character?

Popeye, copied in stainless steel from a mass-market PVC figurine, weighs about 2,000 pounds. It stood on the Las Vegas Strip before moving to a Wynn casino resort near Boston in 2019.

Jeff Koons paired Elvis with which comic book hero in the title of a 2004–2014 series of works?

The Hulk, modeled on an inflatable toy but cast in bronze, weighs almost a ton in these works. One version has a working organ built in.

A Jeff Koons flower drawing greeted visitors on the homepage of which website for two days in 2008?

Google showed the artwork to everyone who opened its main page on April 30 and May 1, 2008, in a design that echoed his Tulips sculpture.

Jeff Koons designed the exterior of which luxury item for collector Dakis Joannou?

A yacht named Guilty carries his design. Joannou is also one of his most devoted collectors, with pieces from every stage of the artist's career.

Jeff Koons has a small acting role as a California politician in which Oscar-nominated 2008 film?

Milk cast him as Art Agnos, the real politician who beat Harvey Milk in a 1976 primary and later became mayor of San Francisco.

Which New York landmark hosted Jeff Koons's Puppy in 2000 and his flowered Split-Rocker in 2014?

Rockefeller Center hosted both flower giants as summer visitors, the second timed to open alongside a retrospective of Koons's career.

The artist Jeff Koons comes from a hometown named York, located in which US state?

Pennsylvania lawns gave him an idea, too: his Gazing Ball series is named after the mirrored garden ornaments common around his childhood home.

Jeff Koons's ten-foot Play-Doh looks like a mound of children's clay but is made of which metal?

Aluminum, in 27 separate painted pieces, makes up the mound, which Koons worked on for two decades, from 1994 to 2014.

Which cartoon character does Jayne Mansfield embrace in a 1988 porcelain sculpture by Jeff Koons?

The Pink Panther rests his chin on her shoulder in the 41-inch piece, part of a series called Banality that Koons had made in editions of three.

Jeff Koons lost a famous copyright case over a sculpture copied from a photograph he found on what?

A postcard carried Art Rogers's photo of a couple with their arms full of puppies. Koons argued his copy was parody, but an appeals court rejected that defense in 1992.

Which New York institution made a Jeff Koons retrospective the final show in its Marcel Breuer building?

Whitney Museum visitors in 2014 were the first members of the public to see Play-Doh, a sculpture Koons had begun twenty years earlier.

The stainless steel model train Jeff Koons made in 1986 actually contains which brand of bourbon?

Jim Beam had sold a collectible bottle shaped like a locomotive, and Koons had it recast in gleaming steel for a series about alcohol and its advertising.

Jeff Koons's explicit Made in Heaven series with Ilona Staller premiered at which art event in 1990?

Venice Biennale visitors saw huge photographs and sculptures of the pair. Koons reportedly destroyed much of the work after the marriage broke down.

Jeff Koons adapted which children's art method so his assistants could paint as if by a single hand?

Color by numbers keeps every canvas consistent: Koons builds each picture on a computer, corrects the colors, then gives his assistants a numbered plan to follow.

New York's governor asked Jeff Koons in 2012 to help review designs to replace which Hudson crossing?

Tappan Zee Bridge was being replaced, and Governor Andrew Cuomo gave the artist a say in the designs. The new span was later named after the governor's father.

Jeff Koons's Gazing Ball paintings each carry a glass sphere of which color on a small shelf?

Blue glass balls sit in front of 35 repainted masterpieces, including works by Manet and Rembrandt, so that viewer and painting are reflected together.

Which fashion designer turned a Jeff Koons sculpture into a platinum pendant for her own label in 2005?

Stella McCartney followed the pendant with a 2006 collection printed with three of his paintings, and the two made graphic T-shirts together in 2005 and 2020.