Jeff Koons’ Tulips Find a Home: A Central Garden in the City of Light

PARIS — For two years, Jeff Koons sought an appropriate place here for his monumental gift to Paris, “Bouquet of Tulips.” In three hours Thursday, he found a garden, which may provide the end to a saga that has agitated France’s cultural circles since November 2016.

City officials said Friday that Koons had agreed to install his colorful sculpture — intended as a tribute to the victims of the 2015 and 2016 terrorist attacks and announced with great fanfare in 2016 — in the gardens of the Petit Palais, which is the home of an art museum near the Champs-Élysée

Koons only donated the sculpture’s concept. A private foundation raised the production and installation costs of 3 million euros (about $3.5 million), which are financed half by French donations, and half by donations by Americans.

“It was urgent to find a place after too much political rambling,” Christophe Girard, the deputy mayor in charge of cultural affairs, said Friday, after he visited the new location with Koons the day earlier. “What’s at stake goes beyond arts.”

The American artist still needs a definitive green light and logistical studies need to be completed, but Girard said that the location met all the criteria and that the inauguration would likely take place in 2019.

Koons, whose sculpture was inspired by the Statue of Liberty, said in 2016 that he wanted the work, a hand holding a fistful of balloon flowers, to “communicate a sense of future, of optimism, the joy of offering.”

He described it as a proof of the long-standing French-American friendship in troubled times. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, has called it “a diplomatic gift as much as an artistic one.”

The piece, which is made of bronze, aluminum and stainless steel, is one of the artist’s largest — it is 34 feet high, 27 feet wide and 32 feet deep.

But what was supposed to be a buoyant present has morphed into a heavy burden.

Koons and city officials had first agreed that the “Bouquet” would be installed in the plaza in front of the Palais de Tokyo, an area popular with tourists located across the Seine, with a view of the Eiffel Tower.

Yet as the plan lingered for months, general discontent over the artist’s intentions started to dovetail with technical challenges over the feasibility of the project.

In January, French artists, politicians and cultural figures asked for the plan to be abandoned, writing in a letter published by the newspaper Libération that the apparent donation “would amount to advertising or product placement.”

The letter, which included signatures from artist Christian Boltanski and a former culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, said Koons’ work symbolized “a type of industrial, spectacular and speculative art.”

“We appreciate gifts,” the letter said, but ones that are “free, unconditional and without ulterior motives.”

A few months later, Culture Minister Françoise Nyssen dropped the initial plans, arguing that the sculpture was too heavy for the plaza’s pavement and that it should stand somewhere “popular, visible and shared by everyone.”

As the project dragged on, the sculpture was sitting in a German warehouse.

There was an uproar from critics who argued that the gesture was clumsy and opportunistic, if not cynical, as Koons didn’t have a direct connection to the terrorist attacks.

“The general outcry was in part caused by a form of outdated anti-Americanism, but it was also a sincere, offended one,” said Guillaume Piens, the director of the Art Paris Art Fair. “Whenever artists touch on memory and victims, it’s hard to see an uninterested, mere artistic act only.”

Piens added that Parisians preferred softer messages about the city’s resilience, not the colorful extravaganza that the “Bouquet of Tulips” displayed, in sharp contrast with the public mood here.

Other works of arts dedicated to the victims have been better accepted.

Soon after the Paris attacks, U.S. artist Shepard Fairey, known as Obey, painted the mural “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” in a working-class neighborhood in the south of the city. Since then, a model of the tribute has made its way to the office of President Emmanuel Macron.

Koons’ “Bouquet of Tulips” features 11 flowers and not a dozen, his art gallerist in France, Jérôme de Noirmont, said, with the missing 12th meant to represent the victims of the attacks. And unlike most of Koons’ similar work, de Noirmont added, the flowers will be matte, and not shiny, “out of respect for the French people.”