Jeff Koons "Balloon Dog" at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Image courtesy of Flickr.

Last year, news broke that the Louvre planned to install a selection of Jeff Koons’ large-scale balloon sculptures in its nineteenth-century galleries. The exhibit was to complement the Centre Pompidou’s comprehensive Koons retrospective, which originated at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Now, according to The Art Newspaper, the Louvre has scrapped the Koons installation due to a “lack of funding.”

The works to be exhibited at the hallowed French institution included Balloon Rabbit, Balloon Swan, and Balloon Monkey. The massive sculptures, made of mirror-polished stainless steel, are notoriously difficult (and expensive) to install. When the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, acquired Hanging Heart (Gold/Magenta) last February, the 3,000-pound-sculpture was shipped via cargo flight, transported to its spot in the institution using a specially designed trolley from Koons’ studio, and installed using a forklift and custom mount. And in 2008, when seventeen of Koons’ sculptures went on view at Versailles, critics were appalled at the £1.6 million it cost to transport the works (most of which came from the French billionaire and Koons collector, Francois Pinault).

Koons has been at the center of a number of controversies since his retrospective opened at the Centre Pompidou in November 2014. A few weeks into the show, Franck Davidovici, a French advertising professional, accused Koons of copyright infringement over his porcelain sculpture Fait d’Hiver. Davidovici claimed that Koons had ripped off an ad he created in 1985 for a French clothing company -- both works feature a brunette woman lying face-up on the ground while a piglet wearing a St. Bernard neck barrel sniffs at her hair. The work was removed from the Centre Pompidou exhibition at the request of its owners. The Davidovici debacle was followed by another copyright infringement case -- this time from the French photographer Jean-Francois Bauret’s widow. Bauret accused Koons of using one of her husband's best known images for his 1988 sculpture Naked. The work, which was featured in the Whitney retrospective and appears in the current exhibition catalogue, is not included in the Centre Pompidou's Koons presentation. The work was damaged, presumably during transport, and museum officials decided not to include it in the show.

Koons has long been a divisive figure in the art world. Considered a pioneering genius by some, he  is often dismissed as a peddler of commercialized kitsch by others. However, Koons’ indelible mark on contemporary art is undeniable. Best known for his reproductions of banal objects, he has forged innovative new approaches to the readymade, challenged the limits of industrial fabrication in monumental works of art, and transformed the relationship of artists to the cult of celebrity. Koons’ work has also had a profound effect on the art market, with pieces often soaring to astronomical heights at auction. Koons became the most expensive living artist when his sculpture Balloon Dog (Orange) sold for $58.4 million at Christie’s in November 2013.

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective will remain on view at the Centre Pompidou through April 27, 2015. After its run in Paris, the exhibition will head to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, where it will remain on view from June 5, 2015, through September 27, 2015.