Doctor's Delight

Jeff Koons’s Doctor’s Delight (1986) originates from one of the most important series in the artist’s early career—Statuary. Sculptures from this series were displayed at the groundbreaking group show coined by the press as the “Neo-Geo” show at Sonnabend Gallery in 1986. Koons’s work, so different from the Neo-Expressionists of the early 1980s, was a standout, and his career was quickly catapulted into the limelight. The version of Doctor’s Delight on offer at Christie’s is all the more exceptional as it belonged to the private collection of Ileana Sonnabend, who discovered a young Koons in the East Village scene and brought him to prominence in her prestigious SoHo gallery.

But not only is Doctor’s Delight historically important to Koons’s career, it also functions as an iconic work in its own right. The comical sculpture shows a scene of a grinning doctor ready to minister medicine to a young woman. Originally, the work was fashioned in capodimonte porcelain, and intended as a humorous, somewhat naughty, mantle decoration. Koons, drawing on the arthistorical precedent of Marcel Duchamp, utilized the object as a readymade sculpture and had it cast in stainless steel, transforming the work’s surface and meaning. It is worth noting that while Marcel Duchamp appropriated non-art objects (such as a bottle rack or shovel) and exhibited them in an artistic setting, Koons sourced low-art objects and, with minimal changes, displayed them in a high-art context. Doctor’s Delight existed as a collectible before Koons’s transformation, but art that was not viewed with favor by the artistic elite. Rather, the porcelain figure that Doctor’s Delight is drawn from is the archetype of popular culture, the antithesis of high-art that was excoriated by noted art critic Clement Greenberg in his famous 1939 essay. As a post-modern meditation on aesthetics, Koons’s Statuary series rejected the clear-cut distinctions between high and low taste, exploring how artistic preferences are related to class. Curator and art historian Katy Siegel concurs: “The series marked the emergence of an important theme in Koons’s work: the validation of popular taste, as linked to the class background of individuals. The stainless steel tchotchkes reassure us that the things we secretly or naturally love (like decorative figurines) are just as significant and worthy of respect as those things (like high art) that we are supposed to appreciate.” (K. Siegel in Jeff Koons, Taschen, 2009, p. 222).

Doctor’s Delight, in signature Koons style, does not arise in a creative vacuum, but is crafted in dialogue with a number of art-historical
references. For instance, Koons thrusts Duchamp’s avant-garde strategies of the readymade into the late 20th century, but Statuary
also contains interesting relationships with the sparser, more straightfaced Minimalism and Conceptual art of the 1970s. Specifically,
Koons’s series wryly draws inspiration from Donald Judd’s outsourcing and fabrication of his artworks, and Doctor’s Delight shiny metallic surface acts as a nod towards the industrial materials of Carl Andre. But Koons gives Minimalism a twist: rather than mimic
the aesthetic of the factory, Koons looks to democratize art, elevating popular cultural objects to the same level as fine art. For this strategy to succeed, Doctor’s Delight had to be created not in bronze (the traditional medium of fine-art sculpture), but rather in stainless steel, the material of choice for many of America’s mass-produced consumer goods. With this simple yet deft touch, Koons shocked the art world of the 1980s, permanently altering the landscape of post-war art history. The rarity and historical importance of this work is unparalleled. Ileana Sonnabend recognized this, and set aside Doctor’s Delight for her own personal collection. It is only now on offer to the public, nearly 30 years later.