What’s Modern?

Jeff Koons tells Alison McDonald about his appreciation for the pioneering artist and thinker Marcel Duchamp.

The Spring 2026 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (1964) on the cover.

Stella McCartney’s new limited-edition capsule collection made in collaboration with Jeff Koons launched in January 2026. Blending the two creators’ singular visions, the collection, which was first seen in McCartney’s Winter 2025 runway show, features a wide array of garments and accessories printed with artworks by Koons and slogans by McCartney. The collaboration continues the pair’s long-standing creative partnership, which has previously included jewelry, prints, and charitable initiatives. At the unveiling in New York, Koons met with Derek C. Blasberg to reflect on the collaboration, the importance of caring and community, and meeting Salvador Dalí when he was nineteen years old.

Nearly fifty years ago, Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns met in Paris and began a collaboration on what would become Foirades/Fizzles, a deluxe limited-edition artist’s book published by Petersburg Press in 1976. Now, on the occasion of the Jasper Johns retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, Gagosian Quarterly looks back to the genesis of this project with a conversation between independent researcher Anthony Atlas and Gagosian director Bob Monk. Their discussion focuses on the creative encounter between the artist and the writer and on how the book and related works became a generative source in Johns’s art.

Don Quaintance’s new book Duchamp in California: Walter Hopps Curates a Retrospective (Menil Collection/König, 2025) details the rich history of the Pasadena Art Museum and the consequential Marcel Duchamp retrospective that Walter Hopps curated there in 1963. Here Quaintance gives the backstory to the monograph and shares an excerpt from the book’s fourth chapter.

The Fall 2025 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Andy Warhol’s Blue Liz as Cleopatra (1962) on the cover.

Sydney Stutterheim traces the linkages and affinities between the work of Richard Prince and that of Bob Dylan. Using Prince’s Untitled (Dylan) as a starting point, she considers the artist’s enduring interest in questions of originality and authorship, as well as his sustained relationship with the worlds of American music and counterculture.

Karen Wong charts the journey of Alexander Calder’s Quatre lances (1964) from its intended site at the Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, to the Centennial Hall in Monaco, and now to its permanent home in a new single-artwork museum designed by Renzo Piano at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. Wong examines the sculpture’s interaction with architecture and environment as part of a larger story of the artist’s relationship with architects.

On April 18, the exhibition Picasso: Tête-à-tête opened at Gagosian, New York. Including works from 1896 to 1972, the full span of the artist’s career, the show is presented in partnership with Paloma Picasso, the artist’s daughter. Here, Michael Cary, one of the organizers of the exhibition, traces the historical precedents that informed the conversational nature of the curation. He also introduces a translation of a 1932 interview with Picasso by the publisher and critic E. Tériade, often quoted in English in part but not in full.

The Spring 2025 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Cy Twombly’s Paesaggio (1986) on the cover.