Jeff Koons and Pompidou Lose Appeal in Magazine Copyright Case

A French appeals court has upheld a 2018 Paris High Court ruling in favor of fashion photographer Franck Davidovici, who in 2014 accused Koons of plagiarizing a magazine ad he had designed. The 1985 ad, for French fashion brand Naf Naf, showed a girl lying prostrate on her back in the snow while a pig with a small barrel around its neck, St. Bernard style, nuzzled her hair. Koons’s 1988 sculpture Fait d’hiver depicted a similar scene, which differed in that the girl was more scantily clad, and that a pair of small penguins stood placidly next to the pig, appearing to observe the proceedings.Davidovici became aware of the sculpture in 2014 after seeing it in an exhibition catalogue accompanying a Koons retrospective originating at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and traveling to the Center Pompidou, in Paris. He filed suit the following year, seeking $352,000 in damages and asking that the state impound the sculpture. The 2018 ruling awarded him $152,000, to be paid by Koons and the Pompidou, but did not order the sculpture’s seizure. The publisher of the exhibition catalogue was fined $2,400.In denying the appeal of Koons and the Pompidou, the court additionally raised the amount of money due Davidovici, to roughly $231,000. The court also stipulated that if Koons or the Pompidou continued to display the work on either party’s website, the offender would have to pay Davidovici $700 per day for the privilege. The catalogue publisher saw its fine raised as well, to $17,000.This is not Koon’s first plagiarism suit, or his first loss in an appeals court. In 2019, an appeals court upheld a 2017 ruling that his 1988 sculpture Banality copied a photograph by the late French photographer Jean-François Bauret.

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