Sotheby's
Contemporary Art Evening Auction
New York | 11 Nov 2014, 06:30 PM | N09221
LOT 47
JEFF KOONS
B. 1955
BEAR AND POLICEMAN
signed, dated 1988 and numbered 3/3 on the underside
polychromed wood
85 x 43 x 36 in. 215.9 x 109.2 x 91.4 cm
Executed in 1988, this work is number three from an edition of three plus one artist's proof.
ESTIMATE 7,000,000-9,000,000 USD
Lot Sold: 8,005,000 USD
PROVENANCE
Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Private Collection, Europe
EXHIBITED
New York, Sonnabend Gallery; Berlin, Galerie Max Hetzler; Chicago, Donald Young Gallery, Banality, November 1988
- January 1989 (an edition no. shown at each venue)
Exh. Cat., Rotterdam, Rotterdamse Kunststichting and Galerie 't Venster, Jeff Koons: Nieuw Werk, January - February
1989, illustrated in exhibition brochure (edition no. unknown)
Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art, A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation, May - August
1989, cat. no. 26, not illustrated (edition no. unknown) and p. 40 (text)
Malmö, Rooseum Malmö, What is Contemporary Art?, June - July 1989, cat. no. 55, p. 103, illustrated in color (edition
no. unknown)
Basel, Kunsthalle Basel, Mit dem Fernrohr Durch Die Kungeschichte, Kunsthalle Basel, August - October 1989, cat.
no. 49, illustrated in color (edition no. unknown)
New York, Museum of Modern Art; Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art,
High & Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture, October 1990 - September 1991, cat. no. 35, p. 397, illustrated in color
(edition no. unknown)
Cologne, Galerie Max Hetzler, Robert Gober, On Kawara, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Albert
Oehlen, Julian Schnabel, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, Philip Taaffe, Christopher Wool, May - June 1992, p. 31,
illustrated (edition no. unknown)
Pully-Lausanne, FAE Musée d'Art Contemporain; Turin, Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea; Athens,
DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art; Hamburg, Deichtorhallen, Post Human, June 1992 - May 1993, p. 109,
illustrated (edition no. unknown)
Bordeaux, CAPC Musee d'Art Contemporain, Collection pour une region: Richard Baquie, Jedermann N.A., Jeff
Koons, Rombouts & Droste, Haim Steinbach, June - November 1993, p. 35, illustrated (edition no. unknown)
Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, From Beyond the Pale: Art and Artists at the Edge of Consensus, 1994, p. 35,
illustrated (edition no. unknown)
New York, Deitch Projects, Pig, April - August 2009 (another example)
LITERATURE
"Atlantisches Bundnis, eine Gesprachsrundemit mit Georg Herold, Jeff Koons und Isabelle Graw," Wolkenkratzer,
January – February 1988, pp. 36-42
"Collaborations, Martin Kippenberger-Jeff Koons," Parkett, no. 19, 1989, p. 35, (text)
Klaus Kertess, "Bad," Parkett, no. 19, 1989, p. 35, illustrated (edition no. unknown)
Jean-Christophe Ammann, "Der Fall Jeff Koons," Parkett, no. 19, 1989, p. 54 (text)
Clare Farrow, Andreas Papadakis and Nicola Hadges, "Jeff Koons: The Power of Seduction," Art & Design 6, nos. 12, 1990, pp. 48-53; reprinted in New Art International, Academy Editions, London, 1991, pp. 153-157
Angelika Muthesius, ed., Jeff Koons, Cologne, 1992, pl. 22, p. 120, illustrated in color (detail), p. 25, illustrated in color
(in installation at Sonnabend Gallery, New York, 1988), and p. 121, illustrated in color (in installation at Galerie Max
Hetzler, Berlin, 1988) (edition no. unknown)
Albig Jorg-Uwe, "Jeff Koons, ein Prophet der inneren Leere," Art-Das Kunstmagazin, December 1992, p. 57,
illustrated (edition no. unknown)
Anthony d'Offay Gallery, The Jeff Koons Handbook, New York, 1992, p. 115, illustrated in color (edition no. unknown)
Munich, K-Raum Daxer, Selected Works from the Early Eighties: Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie
Levine, Allan McCollum, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, 1992
Exh. Cat., San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (and travelling), Jeff Koons, 1992, cat. no. 40, pl. 39,
illustrated in color (artist's proof)
Exh. Cat., Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum (and travelling), Jeff Koons - Retrospectiv, 1992, cat. no. 46, p. 64,
illustrated (edition no. 1/3)
David Littlejohn, "Who is Jeff Koons and Why Are People Saying Such Terrible Things About Him?", Artnews, April
1993, p. 92, illustrated in color (edition no. unknown)
Erik Jens Sorensen, Jeff Koons, Denmark, 1993, p. 64
Exh. Cat., Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Tuning Up, 1994 - 1995, illustrated in color (edition no. 2/3)
The 20th Century Art Book, London, 1996, p. 249, illustrated in color (edition no. unknown)
Thomas Zaunschirm, Kunst als Sudenfall: Die Tabuverletzungen des Jeff Koons, Rombach, Freiburg, 1996, p. 52
Exh. Cat., Berlin, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Die Epoche der Moderne Kunst im 20 Jahrhundert, 1997, pl. 334, illustrated,
(edition no. 2/3)
Exh. Cat., Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Jeff Koons, 2003, p. 66, illustrated, (edition no. 2/3)
Exh. Cat., Tokyo, Mori Art Museum, Inaugural Exhibition Happiness, A Survival Guide for Art and Life, October 2003 January 2004 (another example)
Exh. Cat., Oslo, Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst (and travelling), Jeff Koons: Retrospective, 2004, p. 88,
illustrated in color (another example)
Exh. Cat., New York, C&M Arts, Jeff Koons: Highlights of 25 Years, 2004, pp. 17 and 88, illustrated in color (in
installation at Sonnabend Gallery, New York, 1988) (edition no. unknown)
Ken Miller, "The Establishment: Jeff Koons [interview]." Tokion, March - April 2005, p. 6, p. 16 and pp. 38-41,
illustrated (edition no. unknown)
Exh. Cat., London, Hayward Gallery, Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourist's Eye, 2005 (edition no. 2/3)
Exh. Cat., Monaco, Grimaldi Forum, New York, New York, 2006, p. 479, illustrated (edition no. 2/3)
Müller Von Hans-Joachim, "Wir sind Oberammergau." Monopol, no. 6, December 2006, p. 45, illustrated (edition no.
unknown)
Hans Werner Holzworth ed., Jeff Koons, Cologne, 2007, p. 299, illustrated in color (in installation at Galerie Max
Hetzler, 1988), pp. 304-305, illustrated in color (detail), p. 306, illustrated in color (edition no. unknown)
Gianni Romano and Elena Molinaro, Jeff Koons Retrospettivamente, Milan, 2007, p. 29, illustrated (edition no.
unknown)
Stephanie Seymour, "Jeff Koons: Art Made in Heaven", Whitewall, Fall 2007, issue 7, p. 140, illustrated in color
(edition no. unknown)
Leslie Camhi, "The Seer - Ileana Sonnabend." New York Times Style Magazine, December 2, 2007, p. 209, illustrated
(in installation at Sonnabend Gallery, 1988)
Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Jeff Koons, 2008, p. 69, illustrated in color and illustrated in color
on the back cover (detail) (artist's proof)
Exh. Cat., Versailles, Château de Versailles, Jeff Koons, 2008, pp. 61 and 148, illustrated in color and pp. 62-63,
illustrated in color (detail) (edition no. 2/3)
Robert Pincus-Witten, "Passages: The Eyes Had It." Artforum, January 2008, p. 70, illustrated in color (in installation
at Sonnabend Gallery, 1988) (edition no. unknown)
Thomas Wagner, "Generation Zeitgeist," Art-Das Kunstmagazin, no. 1, January 2008, p. 4, illustrated in color (in
installation at Sonnabend Gallery, 1988) and p. 40, illustrated in color (detail, in installation at Sonnabend Gallery,
1988) (edition no. unknown)
Exh. Cat., Edinburgh, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Childish Things, 2010, illustrated in color pp. 47 and 95 (another
example)
Exh. Cat., Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Jeff Koons, 2012, p. 119, illustrated in color (another example), pp. 120-121,
illustrated in color (in installation at Sonnabend Gallery, New York, 1988) (edition no. 2/3)
Exh. Cat., London, Hayward Gallery, The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture, 2014, p. 129,
illustrated in color, p. 130, illustrated in color (detail) and p. 129 (text) (another example)
CATALOGUE NOTE
“I’ve made what the Beatles would have made if they had made sculpture. Nobody ever said that the Beatles’ music
was not on a high level, but it appealed to a mass audience. That’s what I want to do.” (Jeff Koons in The Jeff Koons
Handbook, New York, 1992, p. 114)
Towering at an imposing stature of almost seven-feet tall, Jeff Koons’s iconic Bear and Policeman from his 1988
Banality series is seductively gargantuan. Simultaneously innocent and menacing, while retaining a fanciful hilarity
concomitant with sadistic transgression, the present work reincarnates our base desires as art and subverts them with
great élan. Bear and Policeman has been exhibited in almost every major international survey of Koons’s output over
the past quarter-century—most recently in the critically acclaimed large-scale retrospective at the Whitney Museum of
American Art in New York.
An anthropomorphized bear wearing a candy-colored striped shirt and a floppy yellow bow tied at the neck escapes
traditional symbolic associations of huggable warmth and affectionate earnestness, instead adopting a leering gaze
and threatening persona. With his arm wrapped tenderly around the shoulder of the typically uniformed British
policeman that peers upward in his grasp, the bear jeers while gripping the Bobby’s whistle—a dramatic reversal of
roles that disrupts the inherent power dynamic between the policeman and his irrational, playful counterpart. When
interviewed for Art21, Koons explained the glaring sexual undertones permeating the relationship between the bear
and the policeman: “There is a sense of sexual humiliation in the over-powering of the Bobby. For me the piece is
really saying that art should be something powerful. But at the same time, there’s a morality that comes along with
that—the respect of other people, that their rights are equal to yours. So Bear and Policeman was always about art
having that power, but being misused and going out of control." The polished brilliance of Koons’s Bear and
Policeman resides in its capacity to conflate the highly ordinary with the surreal, tinkering within an exceedingly
original, controlled, and complex conceptual domain.
In 1988, Jeff Koons unveiled a series of twenty new sculptures in three concurrent shows at the Sonnabend Gallery in
New York, Galerie Max Hetzler in Cologne, and Donald Young Gallery in Chicago. All three galleries displayed the
complete body of twenty works from Banality, each executed in an edition of three such that the simultaneous display
could be made possible. Following his already controversial reputation with the series The New, Equilibrium, and
Statuary, Banality provoked an entirely new level of unparalleled outrage among critics, collectors, and the public. As
Adam Gopnik recalled, Banality “shocked people who claimed not to have been shocked by anything at all since the
early sixties, and caused a scandal of a sort that was…almost touching in its re-creation of an earlier and more
embattled era in the history of modern art.” (Gopnik cited in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art,
Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, 2014, p. 22) Although Banality encouraged hostile reactions and controversy, Koons
maintains that his modus operandi was never guided by provocation; rather, acceptance is imperative to Koons. His
vocabulary is characterized by profound affirmation, buoying viewers of his work to embrace their past and accept an
iconography of optimism irrespective of socially accepted criteria of good taste.
With the Banality series, Koons was seen as ushering in a new aesthetic era: outrageously confrontational, the
audacity of Banality embraces a high-culture version of objects from popular culture that represented mass
Americana, trading on the ubiquity of souvenirs and stuffed animals, the ornaments that both clog and define the life
of the petite bourgeoisie. Sculptural mash-ups that draw iconographic influence from Capodimonte porcelain, airport
gift-shop figurines, stuffed animals, magazines, greeting cards, and popular culture, Banality saw Koons enlarge banal
objects to a shocking degree, yet his figures retain at their very core a truly profound authenticity. Viewing Bear and
Policeman amongst the other Banality sculptures, we are prone to recall these familiar faces of our innocent youth
with affection; magnified and mutated, however, these sculptures present a simultaneous familiarity and strangeness
that seizes our instinctive pleasure and replaces it with an unsettling anxiety. Arguing for the appreciation of massappeal imagery, Koons traffics in the arbitrary distinctions between high and low art, positioning his sculptures in the
uncharted territory between the predetermined polar categories. Growing up in the small town of York, Pennsylvania,
Koons’s father ran Henry J. Koons Decorators, through which Koons came to understand how the middle-class endow
material goods and décor with their deepest and most personal aspirations. Koons invokes a challenging poetics of
class, revealing the emotional investments crystallized in objects; these objects and the desires that they provoke
inevitably vary by class, presenting a stimulating comment on the nature of objecthood and material culture in
America.
Bear and Policeman incites a visceral response from each viewer that stands before its totemic splendor, motivating
instantaneous interpretation. Such a compelling tension between both profanity and desire provokes us to evaluate
our own reactions to the work, thereby admitting our inherent benchmarks of taste: “People respond to these types of
things, but they still distance themselves from it. The Banality work is about the recognition of the response.” (Exh.
Cat., London, Hayward Gallery, The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture, June – September 2014,
pp. 129-30) Banality was meant to not only make us aware of our own decorum, but further impel the removal of the
subsequent shame intuitively felt in response to these works. Altering the domain of the readymade as designated by
Duchamp, with Banality Koons draws from objects that already functioned as art on the shelves and tabletops of
countless middle-class homes, unlike the purely quotidian commodities that Duchamp transported into the realm of
high art. The objects that Koons cites possess no innate use value. Urging viewers to overcome their deeply ingrained
and oppressive barometers of taste, Koons argued for the fulfillment of our lingering desires of such comforting
accoutrements as these commonplace artifacts of our nostalgic memories. Scott Rothkopf called Banality Koons’
“gospel of absolution.” (Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, 2014, p.
22) Through this body of work, Koons desired to provoke a fundamental shift in the relationship between art and life: "
Banality was about communicating to the bourgeois class. I wanted to remove their guilt and shame about the banality
that motivates them and which they respond to…to embrace their own history so that they can move on and actually
create a new upper class instead of having culture debase them" (the artist in Angelika Muthesius, Ed., Jeff Koons,
Cologne 1992, p. 28) Such was the enormity of Koons's undertaking that the icons of this series—Michael Jackson
and Bubbles, Ushering in Banality, Pink Panther, and Bear and Policeman—have come to epitomize a generation and
stand today as the incarnation of an artistic era. Moreover, in breaking many aesthetic and technical boundaries,
Bear and Policeman and the Banality series anticipate the sumptuous sculptures in the monumental Celebration
series.
Bear and Policeman, and the Banality series as a whole, was at the time Koons' most elaborate and dedicated feat of
technical production. Koons commissioned professional craftsmen to execute his porcelain and polychromed wood
sculptures, resulting in a staggering mimesis on a surreal scale that aroused a simultaneous awe and familiarity. Bear
and Policeman is executed in polychromed wood, an intricate and labor-intensive process whereby wood is carved
and later meticulously painted to achieve a naturalistic effigy, originally developed by the sculptors of religious figures
in medieval Europe. Koons outsourced the painstaking production of the sculpture to artisans in the mountains of
Northern Italy in order to achieve the work’s extraordinary precision. The implausible lengths that Koons pursues to
master traditional materials in unprecedented scale and complexity aligns the artist with the sculptural tradition of the
Renaissance masters. Every incision, carving, and sumptuously painted wooden detail that adorns Bear and
Policeman is archetypal of the astronomical standards of perfection that has defined Koons’s oeuvre from his very first
virginal Hoover sculptures through to the flawless stainless steel surface of the Celebration sculpture Moon. The base
of Bear and Policeman bears the signature of the craftsman who executed the work while Koons’ signature marks the
underside. Beginning with the bronze casts of the Equilibrium series from 1985, Koons had always delighted in the
visual paradox and aesthetic delectation of recasting his subject in a new media with the utter perfection of machineprecision finesse. Displaying Koons’s natural predilection for the ornate extravagance of the Baroque, Bear and
Policeman has a purposefully distinct eighteenth century Bavarian charm and feel, which may be found in the
exaggeration of motif; in the seductive surface and in the bright palette; in the exaggerated expressions of the
subjects' faces. Koons’s interest in the eighteenth-century Rococo—the style that exalted the ornate, the seductive,
and the over-the-top—is palpable in his response to this period’s popularization of knick-knacks and figurines among
the petite bourgeoisie, feeding their own aspirations and desires for status and culture in a way that mimics the
contemporary culture of conspicuous consumption.
Witty, intellectual and candid in its presentation, Koons's depiction of the everyday masks a narrative that operates on
numerous levels, confronting the viewer with reflections on social aesthetics while never losing sight of the primacy of
the object's visual appeal. The result is a sculpture which is more authentic in feel than any ornament that he might
have found, a hyperbole of the banal which resuscitates the conceptual genius of Duchamp and rephrases it in a new
authentic voice. Rothkopf recently attested to the series’ enduring resonance: “Banalitymade Koons the superstar we
know him to be today… Stylishness or the lack thereof is neither an absolute positive value nor a negative one; it
changes with the times and without direct correlation to art-historical significance. But Koons’ work remains
impressively resistant to that trait. It tests our jaded open-mindedness. Unlike most once-transgressive art, it has
retained over decades a concussive power, a capacity to perturb and revolt. Looking at it in the present, one still
senses its original sin.” (Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, 2014, p.
23)
Fig. 1
Bear and Policeman installed in the exhibition Jeff Koons Versailles,
2008, Château de Versailles Photo: Laurent Lecat © Jeff Koons
Fig. 2
Bear and Policeman installed in the exhibition Jeff Koons: A
Retrospective, The Whitney Museum of American Art, 2014 © Chris
Melzer/dpa/Corbis Artwork © Jeff Koons
Fig. 3
The artist with works from the Banality series at Sonnabend
Gallery, New York, 1989 Photo: Thomas Hoepker Artwork © Jeff
Koons
Fig. 4
Tilman Riemenschneider Madonna and Child, 1495, 15th century
lime wood with original polychromy, Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna / Mondadori Portfolio / Electa / Remo Bardazzi / Bridgeman
Images
Fig. 5
The classic Hollywood slapstick duo Laurel & Hardy, 1936 © AF
Archive / Alamy