ART & CRAFT

Artist Jeff Koons splashes some of the world’s greatest masterpieces onto a new bag collection for Louis Vuitton.

The fleshy pink for the Mona Lisa was about sensuality, and then the incredible green of the background is almost like a Chinese landscape,” says Jeff Koons. “Even the stitching evokes emotions, when you look at the care and attention to detail in each object.”

So pontificates American artist Jeff Koons, one of the contemporary art world’s most prevalent figures, while describing his inspiration behind a new collaboration with Louis Vuitton. For the Masters collection, Koons has reinterpreted five European masterpieces, including the most famous painting in the world, onto the luxury house’s handbags. Koons is known for his kitsch representation of modern society, from his innumerable erotic works featuring his ex-wife – the porn star Cicciolina – to the record-breaking steel Balloon Dog sculptures, for example. Those works are notorious for different reasons, yet both feed into a polemic oeuvre that has once again flown in the face of convention via his collaboration with Louis Vuitton, which will surely be known as 2017’s most grandiose crossover of fashion and art.

The artist spoke exclusively to Vogue Australia at Louis Vuitton’s Paris HQ, the morning after a star-studded dinner inside the Musée du Louvre that unveiled the

embargoed project to the world. Koons is keen to decode his reasoning behind the collaboration and its controversial artistic appropriation. Amiss to expect even the slightest hint of irony or humour, Koons delivers his answers with a soft-spoken, reverent tone – a twinkle in his eye the only clue to his tongue-in-cheek treatment of some of history’s most celebrated works. Alongside da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503), Koons chose Titian’s sensuous tableau of Mars, Venus and Cupid (1546), Dutch postimpressionist Vincent van Gogh’s pastoral Wheat Field with Cypresses (1889), The Tiger Hunt (1615-16) by Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s La Gimblette or Girl with a Dog (1770) to adorn his 51-piece handbag collection for the 163-year-old luxury house.

Painted centuries apart, the five Masters paintings form a sweeping canon from the grand history of classical art, re-appropriated by Koons through the explicit lens of his own Gazing Ball series of artworks. “I had been thinking of using the gazing ball as a ‘ready-made’ for decades,” Koons tells Vogue Australia, seated among displays of the handbags that he proudly calls artworks. “I grew up in Pennsylvania, where a lot of German communities would place these gazing balls in their front gardens. The gazing ball was a gift – a very generous act inviting passers-by to look back at themselves and the world around them. It’s about the interior and the exterior world.” While Koons has placed those blue mirrored spheres on paintings and sculptures in the past, here that oneiric motif is transformed away from its origins into text-based metallic appliqués, spelling out each artist’s name in bold capital letters as though emblazoned on a football jersey.

“It brings the element of now, a sense of bling and street credibility,” says Koons of his outré graphic approach – undoubtedly the most debated element of the totes, backpacks and pouches that form the bulk of the collection. Looking past the flashy gold and silver embellishments spelling da Vinci, Fragonard, Rubens, Titian and Van Gogh, one is faced with a barrage of more subtle details of which Koons is incredibly proud. Reverent, even. The altered monogram, for one, marks the first time in the label’s history that anyone has dared modify the inverted floral stamp – Koons expanded the design to place the blooms significantly further apart, as though floating across the paintings like gold leaf. “I wanted to give the monogram space,” he claims, “and to treat it differently, rather than as a recurring pattern.” Upon closer inspection, the interlocking ‘LV’ gets a special treatment, too, transformed into his initials ‘JK’ on the right-hand corner of each product. Some even feature his scrawling signature.

The Masters project was unveiled in April at dinner inside the Louvre – a decadent sequel to Vuitton’s autumn/winter ’17/’18 women’s fashion show that Nicolas Ghesquière conducted (at the museum’s behest) in the light-filled Cour Marly. With Catherine Deneuve, Cate Blanchett, Jennifer Connelly, Michelle Williams and Jennifer Aniston in attendance, alongside a slew of art world figures, the three-course meal unfolded in the Denon wing beneath the omnipresent stare of Leonardo da Vinci’s La Joconde. It became quickly apparent that for some attendees – and a barrage of online press – the idea of Mona Lisa’s likeness was easier to digest as a dinner companion than printed on Louis Vuitton’s famed canvas and leather goods.

“I haven’t done many collaborations before, but the experience of creating the Balloon Venus with Dom Pérignon showed me the possibilities and the resources available when working with the LVMH group,” Koons regales, showing off one bag after another accompanied by anecdotes on the process of working with Vuitton between his New York studios and the Paris atelier. The different bags feature leather borders of varying colours, their tones isolated from the respective paintings to further the already intense effect of the subject matter: battle scenes, love trysts, rolling countryside and portraiture encased in borders of Titian’s favourite burgundy, The Tiger Hunt’s bright blue sky, or perhaps a pale green pulled from behind the Mona Lisa’s head. Koons, whose soliloquies tend to attribute ideas of allencompassing “humanism” to the project, goes so far as to liken these bags to his first contact with Manet and a supposed life- changing effect of art on the human genome. Inside them, however, you’ll find no ode to artistic transcendence, but rather a matter-of-fact description of both the artist’s life and the painting stamped in gold, with the odd artist portrait printed below.

“The captions are like a nod to Wikipedia or to Google,” says Koons, as straight-faced as ever when explaining the ‘cheat sheet’ notes that accompany his populist choice of paintings, all of which he insists transcend their provenance and universality to become his artworks, while paradoxically a gift to the people. “His head is a gazing ball, too, but the rabbit is me,” he continues, pointing at one of the leather keyrings bearing the silhouette of his 1986 Rabbit that swings off each bag. “It’s metaphysical and it’s about love – these artworks are a part of all of us,” he muses of paintings by five non-consenting third-party artists implicated in each wallet, scarf and handbag. When you come to think of it, those long-dead masters made art for the people driven by their burning desire for beauty and truth, but in today’s post-truth world full of alternative facts, much success is driven by the thrill of subversion. Perhaps the #me generation will be exposed to these exquisite creations, resurrected by Koons, albeit on a handbag, and be delighted to find their millennial selves gazing back at them. Enter: the artist as logo. Amen.