Koons is found guilty of copying. Again
Fait D’hiver is a 1988 statue by Jeff Koons featuring a woman lying in snow being nuzzled by a pig.
Fait D’hiver is also a 1985 advertisement for the French clothing brand Naf Naf featuring a woman lying in snow being nuzzled by a pig. There are multiple differences. Koons’ Fait D’hiver is a sculpture, not a black-and-white photograph, for a start. Koons’ woman also has sunglasses on her forehead, while his pig is wreathed in flowers. The sculpture also features two penguins.
But to Franck Davidovici, the creator of the ad, the resemblance was obvious the moment he saw a picture of Koons’ Fait D’hiver in autumn 2014, in the catalogue for a blockbuster Koons retrospective held at the Pompidou Center in Paris. He sued for copyright infringement in January 2015, and even tried to have the work seized. (He failed; the work had already been removed from the exhibition.)
Now, almost four years later, France’s legal system has agreed that he had a case. A court in Paris ordered Koons, his company Jeff Koons LLC, the Pompidou Center and a book publisher to jointly pay Davidovici almost US$170,000 (5.6 million baht) for breach of copyright and damages caused. The amount is small compared to the value of Koons’ Fait D’hiver, which the Prada Foundation bought for more than $4 million at auction in 2007.
The court dismissed the defendants’ arguments against the claim, which, according to the judgement, included that Koons has freedom of artistic expression, that the work should count as a parody, and that Davidovici did not make a complaint for almost 30 years while the artwork was shown worldwide. The statue has the same “very recognisable staging” as the ad, the judgement says, pointing out that even a lock of hair on the woman’s face is placed in the same position on the left cheek. The two women also wear the same facial expressions.
This is not the first time Koons has found himself in trouble thanks to works that originally appeared in his landmark 1988 exhibition Banality, based on images from advertising and magazines. Shortly after the original show, he was sued by photographer Art Rogers, whose image of a couple holding eight German-shepherd puppies formed the basis of the sculpture String Of Puppies. The case was settled for an undisclosed amount.
He also settled two subsequent lawsuits stemming from the show, one with United Feature Syndicate over his use of the character Odie from the Garfield comic strip. Last year, a Paris court decided Koons had infringed on the copyright of another French photographer to make a porcelain sculpture of two naked children holding some flowers.