In just the first room of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s David Hockney blockbuster, there are pictures being lent by institutions from all over the world, including ones in London, Oslo, Düsseldorf, Milan, Dallas and Melbourne. The rest have been prised from private collections, such as the knockout painting Berlin: A Souvenir (1962), with its blur of chaotically fractured figures. With so many treats just in this opening suite, you begin to wonder how the next ten rooms will turn out.
The exhibition is called David Hockney 25, and it advertises itself as focusing on the past quarter century of the British artist’s practice. But do not be fooled by that. It goes back to the very beginning, starting with a portrait the 18-year-old Hockney made in 1955 of his father, who was an accountant. When Hockney came to visit the show just before the opening in April, he spent a long time in front of the painting, according to Suzanne Pagé, the artistic director of the Fondation Louis Vuitton. “It was very touching. He’s a very emotional man,” she says.
This is the biggest exhibition of Hockney’s work ever staged and fills the museum. (Incidentally, the building, which opened just over a decade ago, was designed by Hockney’s friend, the California-based architect Frank Gehry, whose portrait is included in the show). You cannot blame Hockney, who turns 88 on 9 July and is constantly in the care of two nurses, to want to put it all out there with bells on. But should he?
Pools and portraits
Well, actually, yes. It is a joy to see those 1970s Los Angeles swimming pools again, and the beginnings and ends of a five-year relationship with the then dazzling blond Peter Schlesinger, hovering at the water’s edge in his salmon pink jacket. Or to luxuriate in the 1968 portrait of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, sitting side by side in Hockney’s first double portrait of the kind. Then, all of a sudden, it is 1990 and you are on the Pacific Coast Highway and in the Nichols Canyon in searingly bright landscape paintings that feel like the lovechild of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne on a sugar rush. They are huge in scale and dramatic in mood, and tell you how Hockney saw these scenes—as hyper vivid rushes of colour and form. But they are rendered in the most meticulous detail; hockney is a fabulous painter.
While Hockney, his partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima and his studio assistant Jonathan Wilkinson certainly applied themselves to this exhibition, the guest curator is Norman Rosenthal, the British art historian who at 80 still knows how to put on a show. It helps that the budget was provided by the foundation, hence all that expensive shipping from places like Singapore and Hawaii. It is hard to imagine a public institution being able to front those costs these days and round up this amount of work.
Hockney painted Portrait of My Father (1955) when he was just 18 years old
© David Hockney/Richard Schmidt
A gallery of densely salon-hung portraits shows how much Hockney likes to create a world around himself. Among the paintings are several family members; other artists, including the late Derek Boshier and John Baldessari; the queen of arts public relations Erica Bolton, rendered in charcoal and crayon; the designer Celia Birtwell, in tartan trousers; and an unnamed man in an armchair whose red velvet upholstery looks real enough to touch. The gallery next door is given over to the other great art trope—the flower painting—though Hockney’s blooms are in unremarkable vases placed on gingham cloth. It is a nod to Henri Matisse and the joy of the details of domestic life.
And then there is Yorkshire, the English county where Hockney was born and raised. Having moved away as a young man, first to London and later to Los Angeles, Hockney started spending more time back in Yorkshire in the late 1990s, leading up to and following his mother’s death in 1999. The area’s ever-changing scenery captivated him and he began delving into English art history—the work of J.M.W. Turner and John Constable—and into traditional techniques like watercolours and oils, as well as painting en plein air, to commit it all to paper and canvas. A 25-piece suite called The Arrival of Spring (2013) shows the changing light and the gradually flowering trees and bushes between February and May, crafting space and shadow using only charcoal as expressively as Constable used pencil.
Devourer of nature
Hockney’s eye is inexhaustible. He cannot stop looking and he cannot stop showing us what he has seen. He is like a member of the Barbizon school, who never goes indoors. He devours hedgerows and hawthorn blossom, later using acrylic and oil as well as his iPad and iPhone to soak it all up. But there are times where it can feel like there is too much to see. A section called “Four Years in Normandy” really does feel like that, with its 220 iPad images of the few acres he roamed during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown. And those works are followed by a rather synthetic series of Starry Night evening skies.
Still, patience is rewarded with a final room that celebrates Hockney’s stage design. The artist created opera scenography from 1975 to the early 1990s, forming an exuberant world of animal masks and butterflies, willow pattern stories brought to life and rakish characters from the commedia dell’arte.
“I love music and when I go to the opera, I like to have something to look at,” says a recording of Hockney’s voice as the immersive experience begins. “But theatre means collaboration, which means compromise.” You get the feeling that compromise has never really been his thing.
• David Hockney 25 is at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, until 31 August, Curators: Suzanne Pagé, Norman Rosenthal, François Michaud and Magdalena Gemra. Tickets: €16 (concessions available)
What the other critics said
In a mostly positive review in The New York Times, Emily LaBarge praises Hockney’s “range as well as his sensitivity” but laments some of the artist’s experiments with new technology, such as a “trio of ungainly ‘photographic drawings’” which “are effectively experiments in Photoshop.”
Jonathan Jones in The Guardian gives it five stars and writes: “In his latest self-portrait, Hockney sits in his London garden and beside him sprout yellow daffodils. Hockney is as reliable as those daffodils, returning at 87 as he did at 82 to show us how beautiful the world is in spite of those who try so hard to ruin it.” Jones adds: “You can learn a lot in this exhibition—not just about photography and the human eye but art history and perspective.”
Alastair Sooke in the Telegraph writes: “On this evidence, Hockney is a complex, even (at times) melancholic artist, seemingly compelled—to my surprise—by a burning otherworldly yearning”, before concluding that “this genial Yorkshireman’s achievement feels, yes, bigger than before, and almost overwhelming”.
