It’s not unusual in the art world for an unknown piece to turn out to be by a major name, or conversely, for a work attributed to a great master to be found to be a fake. More rare, however, is a tussle over authenticity in which the artist themselves is involved, as in a recent case in Milan concerning Jeff Koons.
According to the Times, an anonymous Italian art collector has emerged victorious over the American artist. The buyer, a 74-year-old insurance broker from Genoa, purchased Serpents 2/3 in 1991 for just a few hundred pounds, after stumbling across it at a lost property auction in Milan.
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The collector told Italian newspaper the Corriere della Sera: ‘The box was closed, without sender details, and a small inscription: Jeff Koons, Serpents. He wasn’t famous then but his name was beginning to circulate.’
The small porcelain statue is 34 inches long, and depicts two cartoon-like snakes wearing jaunty green bow-ties. The collector added that his wife took against the work, telling him: ‘It’s them or me.’ He kept the statue nonetheless, and history doesn’t relate whether his wife was eventually won over.
He then attempted to sell the piece at a Christie’s New York auction in 1997, when he reached out to the artist to obtain a certificate of authenticity. Koons refused, arguing the statue was not genuine.
During the litigation process before the Southern District Court of New York, the 67-year-old maintained that the work was a defective prototype and should have been destroyed. The collector argued, however, that Koons had not provided sufficient proof of its supposed defects.
Koons produced his Serpents statues as part of his Banality series, first displayed at exhibitions in 1988, for which three copies of each work were created. The Italian collector said he thought Koons must have made a second original to replace Serpents 2/3 after it went missing. It was this ‘cloned’ version, he maintains, that ultimately found a home in the Ohio University art gallery.
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The Milan appeal court deemed the collector’s sculpture ‘an authorised and authentic artwork of Mr Jeffrey Koons of New York’. The judge added that a creator’s right to deny the authenticity of a work couldn’t be arbitrarily invoked to infringe on the rights of third parties.
One of the most famous contemporary artists in the world, Koons’s Rabbit became the most expensive sculpture ever sold by a living artist when it fetched over $91 million in 2019. The collector reportedly said he hopes the publicity around the case will further increase the value of the sculpture, stating: ‘Who knows how the market will react.’
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