American artist Jeff Koons shows work at Versailles

VERSAILLES, France — An aluminum red lobster hangs from the ceiling alongside a crystal chandelier in the Mars Salon. A plexiglass-encased display of vacuum cleaners and floor polishers sits in front of the official portrait of Marie Antoinette.

And an open-mouthed, bare-breasted blonde holding a pink panther seems to be laughing at a 1729 painting of Louis XV conferring peace upon Europe.

America has invaded the gilded chambers and sculptured gardens of the Château de Versailles in the form of a much-debated exhibition by the American superstar artist Jeff Koons.

Versailles in recent years has displayed only a few select works of contemporary artists, and even then they were shown ever-so-briefly. The exhibition of 17 Koons sculptures marks the first time that the château built by Louis XIV has organized so ambitious a retrospective of one contemporary artist. "Jeff Koons Versailles," which opened on Wednesday, will continue until Dec. 14.

"I'm thrilled with the totality of the whole experience," Koons said Wednesday as he posed for photographers in the palace gardens in front of "Split-Rocker," his 11-ton stainless-steel sculpture covered in 90,000 live flowers and plants. "It's so profound — the high point of my artistic life."

Koons said that he drew his inspiration for his floral sculptures from the "fantasy and control" shown by the Sun King himself.

"It comes from just thinking about what it would be like, I mean, what Louis would kind of have the fantasy to see when he would wake up in the morning, and that he could walk to the window and look out in the gardens and think, you know, 'I would like to see a sculpture made out of 90,000 live, growing plants and I'd like to see it by the time I get back this evening,' " Koons said.

Not everyone was as pleased by the installation, though. Several dozen people demonstrated outside the palace gates early Wednesday, a protest organized by the National Union of Writers of France, a little-known, right-wing group dedicated to artistic purity in France.

The exhibition "strikes at the heart of a civilization" and "is an outrage to Marie Antoinette," said Arnaud-Aaron Upinsky, the group's chairman.

He has called the exhibition "a truly sullying of the most sacred aspects of our heritage and identity," and in an open letter in July to the minister of culture, Christine Albanel, he demanded that the exhibit be canceled.

Koons denied that the placement of his white marble "Self-Portrait" in the same room as portraits of Louis XIV and Louis XVI was a gesture of arrogance.

"It didn't have to do with my own ego, but it did have to do with the playfulness and a contemporary monumentality," he said.

As to why he put an assemblage of vacuum cleaners among portraits of royal women in the queen's antechamber, he replied that, among other things, vacuum cleaners are "very womblike."

Some visitors to the museum seemed unsettled by the presence of Koons' work in the grand 17th-century edifice, with its marble walls, ceiling paintings, marble sculptures, chandeliers and more than 350 mirrors.

Jumko Jaim, a homemaker from Tokyo on her first trip to Paris, called herself shocked at the sight of the ceramic "Michael Jackson and Bubbles" in the center of the Venus Salon.

"This object doesn't suit the beauty of the décor," Jaim said. "It spoils it. There's so much nice modern art in the world. Why this?"

"I didn't come here to see a red lobster that I can buy in a gas station in Quebec to go in my pool," said Sylvie Guerin, an administrative technician from Montreal.

But then, there were critics of Versailles when Louis XIV built it.

As the Duc de Saint-Simon wrote in his memoirs in 1715 of the Sun King's buildings, "Who does not deplore the pride, capriciousness and bad taste they exhibit?"