JEFF KOONS

Mr. Koons has collected since the beginning of his life as a professional artist, even before he could afford to pay for work. In the late 1970s, working in Chicago as a studio assistant for the painter Ed Paschke — working so hard to impress him, he said, that his fingers sometimes bled as he was stretching canvas — he traded a drawing for a Paschke print, which still hangs in his home. By the late 1980s, as his star and his bank balance rose precipitously, he began to collect high-end work by artists he loved, like Lichtenstein, but he was forced to sell a lot of it during an acrimonious divorce and custody battle with his first wife, the Italian porn star and politician Ilona Staller. Those troubles, overlapping with a treacherous period in the late 1990s in which he and his backers almost bankrupted themselves trying to create elaborate stainless-steel sculptures, forced him to stop collecting altogether for a while

New York Times
Feb 25 2010