Huge Paris exhibition reveals David Hockney’s love of Van Gogh

Van Gogh has arguably been the painter who has had the deepest influence on David Hockney, Britain’s greatest living artist. Hockney is now being celebrated with a 400-work exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Entitled David Hockney 25 (until 31 August), most of the works were made during the past quarter century, along with some key earlier ones.

One of the exhibition spaces presents what Hockney calls “The Great Wall”, with reproductions of hundreds of images he has chosen to reflect five centuries of painting. The final section covering the late 19th and early 20th centuries includes 29 pictures by Van Gogh and only 34 by all other artists (Cezanne comes second).

In a large room with portraits there is one of Hockney’s partner and studio manager Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima. The artist was directly inspired by Van Gogh’s Sorrowing Old Man (April 1890), painted in the asylum outside Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. In an interview, Hockney said that he had asked Gonçalves de Lima to find the image and “pull it off the internet and print it”.

The dates in the title of the portrait, 11-13 July 2013, hint at an horrific event. Just four months earlier Hockney’s young studio assistant Dominic Elliott had died by suicide.

Along with the early oil painting 30 Sunflowers (1996), the Paris show also includes two related iPad drawings, one of six sunflowers in a vase and another with a single drooping bloom. These echo Van Gogh’s famed still lifes. 

The dozens of exhibited pictures of blossom in the Paris show are also reminiscent of Van Gogh’s springtime landscapes, one of the Dutchman’s favourite motifs in Provence.

Hockney has been inspired by Van Gogh throughout his 70-year career. He recalls that as a young art student in Bradford he travelled to Manchester in 1956 to see an exhibition at its City Art Gallery. The show’s 130 works, including a version of the yellow Sunflowers, had been lent by Vincent’s nephew V.W. van Gogh (whose collection later passed to Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum).

Hockney is now 87, but despite his age remains hard at work. The Paris exhibition’s head curator Suzanne Pagé says the artist becomes a vector of happiness when he picks up a brush, “even when Hockney the man is going through tragedy”—although unstated, presumably a reference to the death of his studio assistant. In the catalogue she quotes what Hockney wrote to her during the preparations for the show: “I’m always happy when I’m painting— just like Van Gogh was.”

Other Van Gogh news

An intriguing painting formerly attributed to Van Gogh is up for sale on 23 May by the Haarlem auctioneer Bubb Kuyper. The estimate is €70,000-€90,000—a real bargain if authentic, a huge sum if not. In 1959 it was auctioned as authentic by Parke-Bernet in New York, but its recent whereabouts were unknown until 2023, when the present owner bought it at an online auction hosted by Catawiki, presumably for a relatively modest sum. The painting is now reproduced in colour for the first time.

Although Lying Cow (possibly 1882-83) was accepted in the two Van Gogh catalogues raisonnés by de la Faille (1970) and Hulsker (1996), it is now doubted by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The Bubb Kuyper catalogue entry openly states that the museum’s examination “casts doubt on the authenticity of the work”, although they “cannot with 100% certainty declassify it as a work by Van Gogh”. There are two other Van Gogh paintings of cows, one of which is assumed to be authentic (selling for $2m in 2008) and the other is known only from an old black-and-white reproduction.