It is a work that will not go unnoticed. Top 10 meters and weighing 30 tons, the "Bouquet of Tulips" of the American Jeff Koons was inaugurated Friday, October 4 in Paris in the presence of the artist and the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo.
Very happy to unveil the #BouquetOfTulips @JeffKoons in the garden of the Champs-Elysées. A beautiful gift from the American people in Paris, a magnificent symbol of freedom and friendship. To marvel, to move, but also to jostle and make think, is the role of art. @cgirard pic.twitter.com/b9kfDLl1Gg
Anne Hidalgo (@Anne_Hidalgo) October 4, 2019This work was proposed in 2016 by Jeff Koons to the City of Paris, in tribute to the victims of the attacks that had come to plague the country and its capital in 2015. It was to be installed near the Eiffel Tower, a place frequented by tourists. But voices had risen to challenge the location, the cost of producing the work (3.5 million euros paid for by sponsorship), its artistic interest or the personality of the artist. After months of tension, the sculpture finally found a more discreet location near the Petit Palais.
The star of the contemporary art had declared at the end of September to Figaro to have been "saddened" by these controversies, assuring that he had not chosen himself the site originally intended to welcome the "Tulips", but that he had only accepted one of the places proposed by the City of Paris. He also said that money was not his motivation.
The king of controversies
Jeff Koons is regularly controversial. The artist has faced multiple charges of plagiarism, but if he often ignores copyright, he defends himself by speaking of "art of appropriation".
He was convicted in the United States in 1992 for his sculpture "String of Puppies" and, in 1993, for depicting Odie, a character in the Garfield series, in "Wild Boy and Puppy". ".
In 2017, Ukrainian Internet users railed against Jeff Koons, who had unveiled in New York an inflatable sculpture depicting a seated dancer, a quasi-compliant copy of a figurine of a Ukrainian sculptor who died in 1993. In France, in 2018, he was sentenced by the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Paris for "forgery" for having copied the pig of a French brand of women's ready-to-wear, Naf-Naf, in a work exhibited in Paris in 2014.
In 2017, the same Paris court ruled that his work "Naked" was the counterfeit snapshot of a French photographer showing two naked children, and sentenced him to pay damages to the rights holders of the author of photography.
In 2008, he also aroused criticism by exhibiting in Versailles, both in the Palais gardens and in the apartments. Some had asked for its prohibition by judging negatively the intrusion of such a subversive artist in a place marked by classicism. His exhibition was a great success.
With AFP