Old Masters for New Masters: Jeff Koons's purchase of a late-medieval sculpture suggests that contemporary artists have a subtler understanding of the history of art than their admirers realise

Apollo, April, 2008 by Michael Hall

There was a certain amount of bafflement in the press last month when it was revealed that the buyer at Sotheby's of a ravishing limewood sculpture of St Catherine by the great late-medieval German carver Tilman Riemenschneider was none other than Jeff Koons. As the New Yorker discovered, this was not Koons's first entry into the Old Master market: he owns a nude painted in 1866 by Gustave Courbet that is on loan to the Metropolitan Museum's current Courbet retrospective. Koons himself has drawn parallels between Courbet's notorious Origine du Monde, a close-up painting of a woman's genitals, and his own Made in Heaven series depicting him having sex with his former wife, Ilona Staller, better known as the pore star La Cicciolina.

So far as I know, nobody has suggested any parallels between Koons's work and Riemenschneider's. Perhaps he simply wanted the sculpture for its beauty. In any case, there is something very encouraging about this unexpected link between an Old and a New Master in an age when contemporary art has become a lifestyle statement that has more to do with fashionable interior decoration and the luxury-goods market than it does with the history of art. Yet although from the point of view of galleries, exhibitions, collectors--and even magazines--contemporary art seems content to inhabit a ghetto, contemporary artists very often have a much wider field of vision than their admirers appreciate.

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Even the most self-consciously avant-garde artists of the past century--Picasso and Francis Bacon immediately come to mind--were constantly aware of the Old Masters as the standard to which they aspired, and among whose number they hoped (or indeed, expected) one day to be counted. Even artists who are famous as embodiments of a peculiarly modern vision set themselves the test of matching the Old Masters more often than is realised. This is evident in a willingness to tackle the traditional big themes--mortality, the nature of God and so on--evident, for example, in Damien Hirst's work, with its increasingly overt references to the Christian tradition, or--as Simon Grant fascinatingly reveals on pages 56-61--in new stained glass by Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. It is telling that Andy Warhol owned 18th-century copies of full-length official state portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte, clearly touching on key themes in his work, portraiture and reproduction.

Warhol's work as portrait painter to the famous and rich has often made critics uncomfortable. We are so used to the idea that art must be challenging or subversive that it is hard to accept that it can be great without being either. Koons has often said--as in Martin Gayford's interview with him in last month's APOLLO--that he is an optimist, who creates optimistic art. If we are to search for a link between Koons, Riemenschneider and the Old Master tradition, that surely is where it lies.

APOLLO'S EDITORIAL BOARD

This month we welcome some distinguished new names to our honorary editorial board. To the list on page 12 have been added Sir John Boardman, one of the world's greatest scholars of classical art; Charles Saumarez Smith, newly installed as secretary and chief executive of the Royal Academy in London after an outstanding directorship of the National Gallery; and Diana Scarisbrick, the celebrated historian of jewellery, who is also one of APOLLO's most long-standing regular contributors. The editorial board's contribution is something like the traditional role of the monarch in the British constitution--to encourage, to advise and to warn. Next month, however, one of the board's number have a more visible role, as our special issue on Chinese art has been guest-edited by Dame Jessica Rawson. For that, and for the invaluable, regular behind-the-scenes contributions of all the board, I am most grateful.