Jeff Koons puts his personal art collection up for sale: around $100 million at Christie’s

Jeff Koons, one of the world’s most famous contemporary artists, is quietly selling around $100 million from his personal art collection at the Christie’s auction house this autumn, as ARTnews reports in its Morning Links of 5 October 2026.

According to ARTnews, the bulk of the treasure comes from a series of intensive purchases Koons made in the late 2000s and includes works of the Dutch Golden Age as well as paintings by Pablo Picasso and Édouard Manet — a rare window into the tastes of the collector hiding behind the artist of “Balloon Dog”.

The news also matters because of Koons’s own weight in the market: his sculpture “Rabbit” (1986) sold for $91.1 million at Christie’s New York in May 2019, making him the most expensive living artist at auction (as The Art Newspaper reported at the time), while “Balloon Dog (Orange)” had reached $58.4 million in 2013.

The sale comes in a hot season for large private collections: Sotheby’s sold the Joe Lewis collection in London for £249.3 million — a record for a single collection in Britain — while in November it brings to New York the legendary Blaquier collection, with a Van Gogh valued at around $180 million.