Koons takes Chateau de Versailles by storm with pop art revolution

US king of kitsch Jeff Koons takes the Chateau de Versailles by storm on Wednesday, ruffling the stately pomp of the French royal court with his riotous larger-than-life pop art.

From a bright red hanging inflatable "Lobster" to a spaceman-like silver "Rabbit," 17 works by Koons, the world's biggest-selling living artist along with Lucian Freud, go on show in a more than unlikely spot – the sumptuous apartments and gardens of the palace west of the French capital.

The three-month exhibition will be the first in France devoted to the 53-year-old New Yorker, whose biggest real-life stunt may have been his short-lived marriage to Italian porn star-turned-legislator, "La Cicciolina".

Koons shot to fame in the 1980s with sophisticated renditions of kitsch or mundane objects, many made of stainless steel.

Contemporary art, he argued while preparing the Versailles show, "is so imprisoned in the present" that showing new works alongside old rebuilds a link with history and the history of art.

A centre-piece of the indoor-outdoor show is a monumental floral work he describes as half-dinosaur, half rocking-horse head, the "Split-Rocker" covered with 100,000 flowers that will tower over the Orangerie gardens. But the exhibition has drawn mixed feelings, with some traditionalists decrying it as an assault on French heritage.

Edouard de Royere of the French Heritage Foundation described it as an "intrusion" into "such a magical place" while the Versailles Society of Friends gave it a lukewarm welcome.

A little-known group, the National Union of French Writers, has called for a demonstration outside the palace gates in protest at the "affront" to the memory of the Sun King, Louis XIV.

Versailles has always been a laboratory for taste. "I can just picture the Cicciolina in the bed of Louis XIV," mocked critic Didier Rykner on his website La Tribune de l'Art.

Organisers brush aside such criticism, an echo of a bitter debate about tradition and modernity that greeted the building of the glass-and-metal pyramid at the Louvre museum in 1989.

"Versailles has always been a laboratory for tastes and fashions," hit back the Versailles palace's director Jean-Jacques Aillagon. "It should be a place for living culture, not something frozen in formaldehyde."

Aillagon said there could be a "real debate" about Versailles' links with the art world, but not one "based on prejudice and intimidation".

Questions have also been raised over who will benefit from the show.

Five of the Koons works are drawn from the private collections of Francois Pinault, the French business tycoon-turned-patron of the arts, who covered almost half of the 1.9 million-euro ($2.7m) cost of the exhibition.

Such a high-profile event, in a major tourist site visited by more than seven million people per year, is certain to further boost the value of the works, suggested Le Monde newspaper. Critics point out that the chateau's director Aillagon used to work for Pinault, raising concerns about a possible conflict of interest. But Aillagon rejected the criticism as "extremely offensive" and "hurtful".

"I no longer work for Francois Pinault. I am independent, although we are friends. And Jeff Koons' value on the art market did not wait for Versailles to go through the roof!"

Known for his giant statues of balloon dogs and similar cheerful fare, Koons shocked the art world in the 1990s with a string of sexually-explicit works showing himself and "La Cicciolina", real name Ilona Staller, whom he later married and divorced. (AFP)

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