The mighty Alhambra on the outskirts of Granada in southern Spain is a monument to the possibilities of merging artistic traditions. Its sprawling complex of buildings, accumulated over the centuries according to whoever was in power, belongs to both Islamic and Christian architectural styles. A relatively late addition was the magnificent 16th-century Palace of Charles V, of which the central courtyard is a particularly exquisite example of the achievements of the Italian Renaissance.
In an exciting tribute to the unceasingly generative potential of juxtaposing the past with modern and contemporary art, the palace is currently housing the exhibition “Reflections: Picasso/Koons at the Alhambra” until March 16, 2025. This unusual, one-off installation of just five works—three by Koons and two by Picasso—is the first in a new exhibition series titled “Reflections” that was organized by the Picasso Museum Málaga. It will take place at historically significant sites across the Spanish artist’s native region of Andalusia.
The surprising, even brazen, choice to inaugurate the series by pairing Picasso with ever-divisive celebrity artist Jeff Koons feels like a declaration of intent to go big. It is justified by the fact that both artists were inspired by some of the same ancient motifs, in particular that of the Three Graces.
Installation of Jeff Koons, Three Graces (2016-22) in “Reflections: Picasso / Koons at the Alhambra.” Photo courtesy of Museo Picasso Málaga.
And I must admit, being a Koons skeptic, that I left more convinced than I had arrived. This is primarily thanks to the exhibition’s centerpiece: a fantastically gaudy version of the Three Graces based on a Meissen porcelain figurine. It is placed in one of the courtyard’s empty niches by happy accident since it was too hefty to fit through the windows of the unremarkable and confined gallery space for which it was originally intended.
At the show’s opening earlier this month, as he saw the work installed for the first time, Koons said: “It really felt like the courtyard was collecting all the energy of the universe, just bringing everything in, and functioned like a jet engine so that it just comes out so much more powerful.”
This is a classic example of how Koons claims to perceive things. I didn’t feel unusually swept up by cosmic energies, but I did find the interruption of such a refined classical setting of spare ornamentation and orderly harmony by a glistening piece of aggrandized tat to be excitingly perverse. And hard not to love.
I see it all as a part of Koons’s plan to brashly demolish hierarchies that insist one kind of art is more “fine” than another. Over the years, he has certainly succeeded in offending sophisticated sensibilities, if not big wallets, with his infamous balloon animals. In 2019, the $91.9 million Rabbit set a record for the highest-selling work by a living artist.
Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Standing Woman) (2014) in “Reflections: Picasso / Koons at the Alhambra.” Photo courtesy of Museo Picasso Málaga.
The second part of the show sees the remaining works exhibited inside the Museum of Fine Arts of Granada’s gallery dedicated to art from the late Gothic to Baroque period. Once again, Koons steals the show.
His Gazing Ball (Standing Woman) (2014) cuts a striking figure against the polychromatic wood statue behind. It was based on a plaster cast of a copy of a Roman sculpture once owned by Picasso but with a sly Koonsian twist: the classical figure balances a blue gazing ball on one shoulder. These kitsch ornaments muddle clear delineations between high and low culture: in medieval Italy they were produced by skilled craftsmen and highly coveted, but nowadays, they typically decorate suburban backyards.
Although, as Koons acknowledged, his practice of playing with copies of existing objects to subvert our expectations is more in the Duchampian tradition, he has also linked the tendency to Picasso’s use of everyday discarded materials like newspaper clippings or a piece of old rope to make collages. He praised “this acceptance of the world around us.”
“I work with things that preexist as a way of practicing acceptance,” he said. “If we look at everything as being perfect in its own being, everything is available to us, absolutely everything. If we segregate, if we make judgments, we limit the opportunities.”
Installation of Pablo Picasso, The Three Graces (1923) and Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Standing Woman) (2014) in “Reflections: Picasso / Koons at the Alhambra.” Photo courtesy of Museo Picasso Málaga.
Though unfailingly friendly and polite, Koons is essentially inscrutable. As he gazed into the middle distance and gave a rousing speech about the spiritual or emotional effects of his work, it was not hard to imagine him excelling as a cult leader.
His use of pre-existing objects in art is, apparently, ultimately about “trying to communicate also that people understand that it’s about themselves, that they’re perfect in their own being. Everything’s about this moment, moving forward and transcending. When we learn to accept ourselves, then we’re able to accept other people.”
Hanging nearby, Picasso’s The Three Graces (1923) is not one of his standouts but, with its draped female figures posed in a listless contrapposto, it makes a suitable comparison with Koons’s work. Both artists were inspired by the same Raphael painting of the Three Graces.
“I feel this communal sense of gathering,” said Koons of the Picasso work. “We want to gather around it, not just one viewer, but as a community. You can feel that we’re all invited. It represents coming in.”
The final two works in the exhibition are Koons’s Gazing Ball (David Intervention of the Sabine Women) (2015–16), a copy of French painter Jacques-Louis David’s celebrated 1799 painting but with another blue gazing ball planted in the midst of the main action, and Picasso’s Head of a Warrior (1933). They are paired because the sculpture echoes the painting’s depiction of Romulus’s face in profile wearing a Spartan-style helmet.
Installation of Pablo Picasso, Head of a Warrior (1933) and Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (David Intervention of the Sabine Women) (2015-16) in “Reflections: Picasso / Koons at the Alhambra.” Photo courtesy of Museo Picasso Málaga.
Koons has produced many versions of his “Gazing Ball” idea using famous paintings from art history, including the Mona Lisa and one by Picasso. He believes that the reflective balls introduce an infinite new dimension, greatly enhancing the dimensionality already achieved by Renaissance painters, thanks to their adoption of three-point perspective. After all, those Old Masters probably never imagined that one day the viewer could actually enter the picture plane.
“I see the gazing balls as really representing everything,” Koons explained. “At first you look at it and it affirms you, the viewer. But [then] you notice the painting is also affirmed because it’s reflected into the ball.” In this way, you celebrate the artist and “all the things the artist enjoyed, loved, and celebrated. I’m able to give homage to the artist and at the same time Leonardo can be giving it up to [Paolo] Uccello and all the artists that he enjoyed.”
How we are influenced by what we see—and in turn influence others—is brought to the fore by this show, and brings Koons towards some more philosophical musings. “All culture is really a graffiti of some form,” he suggested. “Of us absorbing culture, being changed by whatever that culture is, and experiencing synapses in our brain, developing and becoming a slightly different human being, having some form of transcendence, and then having an effect on the world.”
Koons insisted several times that we are transcending and, though he didn’t quite specify what, his work pulls the centuries-long accumulative creative effort that is the Alhambra into the 21st century. The overall effect is, indeed, a little transcendent.
“Reflections: Picasso/Koons at the Alhambra” is on view at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain through March 16.