Jeff Koons, Totem of Contemporary Art, Builds a Giant Statue in the Shadow of Ancient Greek Idols

ATHENS — The mounting of a work by the artist Jeff Koons at the Museum of Cycladic Art at Athens unites the work of unknown hands from millennia ago with the confection of a man whose name is shorthand for the foibles and riches of the contemporary art world. Did the Cycladic sculptors, creators of uncanny forms, have their own versions of Mr. Koons, artists who became brands? Here, he shows himself their apprentice.Cycladic art is one of the glories of Bronze Age civilization as it flowered across the islands of the Aegean Sea between three thousand and one thousand before the common era. The Cycladics, along with Minoans and Mycenaeans, were the titanic civilizations, still shrouded in mystery, that predated Homer and the Greek alphabet by millennia. The Cycladics are known best for their marble figurines with folded arms and blank faces.These figurines are holding court at New York by virtue of a loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art from the Leonard Stern Foundation. “Cycladic” comes from the Greek for “circle,” a reference to the circular island chain that surrounds Delos, the patch of volcanic rock that was believed to have been the birthplace of the great god Apollo. The sculptures, sometimes called “folded-arm figurines,” were buried with their owners.The Cycladic Museum has made a habit of pairing its otherworldly permanent collection —the figurines manage to be both unfathomably ancient and unrelentingly avant-garde, even futuristic — with other luminaries. There have been exhibitions linking the Cycladics to Caravaggio, El Greco, Twombly, and Picasso. For the collaboration with Mr. Koons, the museum spotlights even older objects — Paleolithic statues of Venus.Mr. Koons’s contribution is a giant stainless steel creation, “Balloon Venus Lespugue (Orange).” His inspiration is “Venus of Lespugue,” a sculpture crafted from tusk ivory some 25,000 years ago and discovered at the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains. The original, which is among the earliest known representations of the human body, resides at the Musée de l’Homme at Paris. It is a fertility idol of small stature but abundant charisma.‘Venus of Lespugue’ (frontal view), 28,000 before the common era. Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Musée de l’Homme, Paris. Peter Tavitian for Museum of Cycladic ArtThe Cycladic Museum explains that the “exhibition explores the female form from the Paleolithic era to contemporary art, proposing a dialogue that spans more than 40,000 years of human creativity.” Mr. Koons’s contribution is on display here for the first time, arriving via loan from private collections. His sculpture stands 102 inches tall. The venuses range in height from 4.7 centimetres to just under 15 centimetres. Is bigger necessarily better?In a video accompanying the exhibition Mr. Koons declares that his use of stainless steel means that the sculpture can “reflect you” and makes “Balloon Venus Lespugue (Orange)” a work that is “all about you.” He adds, with the tone of straightforward and earnest delight that is something of a trademark, that “we are like balloons.” His “Balloon Dog (Orange” fetched $58 million at auction in 2013, and “Rabbit” raced to $91 million in 2019. He is a Pop tycoon.Mr. Koons has proven lucrative — his lifetime auction sales have soared to more than $1 billion — even as he has come in for withering criticism from those who see his oeuvre as chock full of schlock. The Times’s Michael Kimmelman reckons that his work amounts to “one last, pathetic gasp of the sort of self-promoting hype and sensationalism that characterized the worst of the 1980s.” Mark Stevens decried as one of those who “serve the tacky rich.”Mr. Koons muses that “a viewer might at first see irony in my work, but I see none at all. Irony causes too much critical contemplation.” Sometimes a giant stainless steel rabbit is just a stainless steel rabbit. The critic Harold Bloom writes that Shakespeare’s ironies were so capacious that they were “too large to be seen,” and the same could be said of the Cycladic statues, whose blank faces stare endlessly into the tides of what Homer once called the “wine dark sea.”

Jeff Koons, Totem of Contemporary Art, Builds a Giant Statue in the Shadow of Ancient Greek Idols

Jeff Koons, Totem of Contemporary Art, Builds a Giant Statue in the Shadow of Ancient Greek Idols

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