Jeff Koons’s broken family
Koons's son, Ludwig, turned against him. His daughter, Shannon, tracked him down 20 years after she was given up for adoption.
Jeff Koons wishes he’d never fallen in love, said Andrew Anthony in the London Observer. In the late 1980s, the pop artist and sculptor became obsessed with Italian porn star Ilona Staller, after spotting her picture in an adult magazine. “I was moved by the fantasy of the photographs,” he explains. “They were like a fairy tale.” Koons invited Staller to the U.S. to model, and the couple fell in love. “Ilona was very comfortable with her body, so that was very liberating for me.”
They married in 1991, and a year later their son, Ludwig, was born. But the relationship soured, Koons filed for divorce in 1992, and Staller fled to Rome with Ludwig. “After months of trying, I was eventually able to see my son, but only for an hour and a half under armed guard.” Today, Koons has little contact with Ludwig. “My son was turned against me.”
But as he lost one child, he was reunited with another. In 1995, his daughter, Shannon, tracked him down, some two decades after she was given up for adoption under orders from his college girlfriend’s parents. That adoption, he says, drove him to become famous. “It [made] me want to have more visibility so that my daughter could find me. I always hoped we could reconnect.”
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