Controversial is too limited an adjective to describe Jeff Koons and his creations. In a ten-year-old article in New York Magazine entitled “Jeff Koons is the most successful American artist since Warhol. So what’s the art world got against him?”, Carl Swanson describes him to a tee: “Like Warhol, Koons is a Pop artist who is himself a Pop figure, one who gets to hang out with the world’s richest collectors, who can afford to fund his visions of the unsullied magical object”.  Mostly known by the wider public for his gigantic, gaudy and playful sculptures, and for marrying porn star Ilona Staller, Koons is one of the most provocative, unmistakeable and lucrative artists alive today. It’s not so much a question of whether you like his Balloon Dogs but how much you’d be willing to pay for them.

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The documentary Jeff Koons. A Private Portrait [+lee también:
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ficha de la película], by Pappi Corsicato - which is premiering in Rome Film Fest’s Freestyle section and hitting Italian cinemas on 23, 24 and 25 October, courtesy of Nexo Digital - celebrates the American artist who opened the doors to his farm, situated close to his childhood home in York, in Pennsylvania, to the Italian director. Many of Corsicato’s documentaries are dedicated to contemporary artists like Richard Serra, Sol Lewitt, Gilbert & George and Julian Schnabel. “He had a different outlook on things”, Schnabel insists in this documentary about Koons. “His vision was special because he was presenting something which already existed, but was new”. He’s referring to Koons’ approach back when he first started making his way in the early Eighties, exhibiting vacuum cleaners inside plexiglass casing lit up by fluorescent lights, and calling the series "The New”. It was an ironic critique of consumerist culture and the banality of mass culture, at a time when he was working as a Wall Street broker to fund his art.

Corsicato’s documentary reconstructs Koons’ artistic life through archive footage and interviews with critics, gallery owners, biographers and artists along the lines of Mary Boone, Jeffrey Deitch, Massimiliano Gioni, Antonio Homem, Dakis Joannou, Stella McCartney, Andy Moses, Norman Rosenthal, Scott Rothkopf and Linda Yablonsky. The director follows Koons during his 2021 five exhibitions tour across Europe and in his retrospective  “Shine” in Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi. But what Corsicato, and Koons himself, is really interested in is showing his private side. On his grandparents’ farm in Pennsylvania, which Koons bought back off the back of his success, he’s surrounded by his six children from his most recent wife Justine Wheeler, and Icelandic sheep and horses. Their relationship seems serene, conflict-free. And, arguably, this focus on his children and on family traditions says a lot about the origins of the childlike wonder which characterises his work. Koons offers up scraps of his outlook on art and the world with calculated affability and composure. There’s nothing of the subversive artist here. The criticism and derision directed at the “Made in Heaven” series – sexually explicit paintings and sculptures in which Jeff himself is depicted with his then wife Ilona Staller - is but a painful memory.

But what’s missing in this celebratory rite of a documentary is a counterpart expressing the criticisms received by Koons over the years, which are surreptitiously alluded to on various occasions but are never fully explained. A discordant voice might have lent greater force to this portrait, which is nevertheless fascinating for viewers looking to deepen their understanding of how that perfect creative machine actually functions.

Jeff Koons. A Private Portrait is produced by Nexo Digital, who also hold the international rights to the film. Following its release in Italy, the documentary will hit the Czech Republic and Slovakia on 13 November via Aerofilms, the USA on 14 November via BY Experience, and Poland on 24 November via Liveincinema.