Anish Kapoor

Six works in the gardens, June 2015

Kapoor's was the eighth time the estate had invited a contemporary artist in. It opened to the public on Tuesday 9 June 2015 with six pieces, none of them inside the palace itself: four were set along the Grande Perspective, the central axis of the gardens that runs the eye from the water parterre to the horizon, and Catherine Pégard, the president of the château, introduced the show by saying that for Kapoor a work does not exist alone but through the person seeing it.

Dirty Corner was the largest. It is a horn of Cor-Ten steel, the alloy that weathers to a deep rust, sixty metres long and standing about ten metres at the mouth, its wide opening presented head-on to the visitor and its far end tapering into a tunnel. Kapoor had built it in 2011 for the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan, where the public could walk inside it and where a machine slowly buried it under a hundred and sixty cubic metres of red earth. At Versailles a barrier kept people out, and the steel sat in a heap of soil and rocks, one of which had been painted deep red.

The quarrel before anyone had seen it

The scandal arrived nine days before the exhibition did. On 31 May the Journal du Dimanche published an interview in which Kapoor, describing the sexual charge of the work, was quoted calling Dirty Corner the vagina of a queen taking power. He backed away from it almost at once: at his press conference on 5 June he denied the wording, and told Le Figaro on 8 June that he was not sure he had said it, or said it that way. By then it did not matter. Sex plus royalty had given the French press a fight it could hold without anyone having seen the sculpture.

The writer Christian Combaz called the show a profanation of memory in Le Figaro on 3 June. Two opposition councillors on the Versailles municipal council, Valérie d'Aubigny and Fabien Bouglé, wrote to Catherine Pégard on 6 June to denounce what they called grave damage to historic and cultural heritage. Kapoor, for his part, had already complained to Le Monde that he had had to raise the money for the exhibition himself.

Three attacks, and the decision to leave the damage

In June somebody threw yellow paint over the inside of the steel horn. Kapoor had it cleaned off, describing the act as political vandalism that uses an art material to do real violence.

In early September the sculpture and the rocks around it were sprayed with slogans in white paint. The BBC recorded two of them: "Christ is king in Versailles" and a line calling the work "the second rape of the nation by deviant Jewish activism". Kapoor, who is Jewish, said the words would stay where they were. President François Hollande called the attack hateful, and the prime minister Manuel Valls promised the culprits would be punished. Within days the work was defaced a third time.

The sculpture will now carry the scars of this renewed attack. I will not allow this act of violence and intolerance to be erased. Dirty Corner will now be marked with hate and I will preserve these scars as a memory of this painful history. I am determined that art will triumph.

Fabien Bouglé, the councillor who had objected to the exhibition in June, went to law over the graffiti, arguing that leaving it on public display incited racial hatred. A tribunal in Versailles ruled that the inscriptions had to be erased and an alarm installed. The ruling ran straight into the strongest artist's protection in Europe, French droit moral — the author's moral right, which lets a creator control how a work is presented and object even to its alteration or destruction. Kapoor put a photograph of the sculpture under black sheeting on Instagram and wrote that the racists had won a court judgment forcing the racist graffiti to be covered, that the artist and Versailles were being blamed for propaganda they had not made, and that the racists could not be allowed to win. To Le Figaro he said the decision broke his heart.

Then he found a third way. He had the defaced areas covered in gold leaf, so that the slogans vanished under gilding without being cleaned away, and called it his royal response. Removing them, he said, would deny that they had happened; gilding them turned the nastiness into something else, and left a work with a painful past that could still claim the beauty of art. Dirty Corner stayed in the gardens, gold and all, until the exhibition closed on 1 November 2015.

Bombay, a kibbutz, and Hornsey

Kapoor was born in Bombay, now Mumbai, on 12 March 1954, to a Hindu father and a Jewish mother whose family came from Baghdad. He grew up there and went as a young man to a kibbutz, one of Israel's collective farms, where he decided against the university place he was expected to take.

I don't want to go to university. I want to go to art school and be an artist. I was lucky, I think. I knew that when I was 17.

He came to London instead, studied at Hornsey College of Art from 1973 to 1977 and did postgraduate work at Chelsea School of Art in 1977 and 1978, and has lived and worked in the city since. The earliest solo exhibition his studio lists is a Paris one, at Patrice Alexandre in 1980; he showed at the Lisson Gallery in London from 1982, and it represents him still.

Pigment, void, mirror

The work that made his name in the early 1980s was made of loose pigment: forms in plaster and wood dusted so thickly in saturated reds, yellows and blues that the colour seemed to come off them onto the floor. From there he moved to the void: stone and fibreglass hollowed out and coated so that the opening reads as a flat dark disc rather than a hole. That is exactly the trick that once sent a visitor in Portugal falling two and a half metres into an artwork he had taken for a painted circle.

Then came the mirrors and the engineering. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1990 with Void Field and took the Premio Duemila for the best young artist there; the Turner Prize followed in 1991, judged that year against Ian Davenport, Fiona Rae and Rachel Whiteread. Marsyas, in 2002, stretched a single PVC membrane between three steel rings in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London. He named it for the figure flayed alive by Apollo in Greek myth because, as he put it, the form refers to an interior: it is a stretched skin. Cloud Gate, the polished steel bean installed in Chicago's Millennium Park in 2004, is the piece most of the world knows. He was appointed CBE in 2003 and knighted in 2013.

Leviathan at the Grand Palais, and the blackest black

Kapoor's other big Paris commission came four years before Versailles and caused no trouble at all. In 2011 he filled the glass-roofed nave of the Grand Palais for Monumenta, the commission that hands that vast hall to a single artist, with Leviathan, an inflated red structure that visitors walked into. In the same year he showed in the Chapelle des Petits-Augustins at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, the national art school on the rue Bonaparte.

The controversy that followed him after Versailles was about a colour. Vantablack is a coating of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes developed by the English firm Surrey NanoSystems and shown publicly in 2014; it absorbs so nearly all the light that falls on it that a crease in a sheet of it is invisible. Kapoor telephoned the company as soon as he heard of it, and when a sprayable version made artistic use practical, Surrey signed a contract giving him exclusive rights to the material in art. Artists objected loudly to one man owning a colour. Kapoor's defence was that the arrangement was a working collaboration like the ones he has with steel fabricators, and that he had spent his career on objects that absorb light: "I've been long engaged in the idea of the void object, the object that absorbs all light, which is kind of a non-object in a way."