At first, it might have sounded too good to be true. In November 2016, American artist Jeff Koons offered the city of Paris a huge new piece of public art that would cost the city nothing.

Koons’s 40-foot high Bouquet of Tulips would sit outside two of the city’s most important art spaces, the Museum of Modern Art and the Palais de Tokyo, and function as a defiantly colorful monument to the 130 victims of the November 2015 attacks. Its construction would be funded by private donors.

A work from on…