One advantage of being possibly the most famous living artist and having reached the grand old age of 87 is that the world gets to see retrospectives of your work at regular intervals. So is it worth making the effort to see the latest David Hockney exhibition, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris? Unequivocally yes!
Given the fact that the show covers Hockney’s work from 1955 (with the artist’s early portrait of his father) to the present day, it seems an odd choice to call it “Hockney 25,” but as most of the exhibition’s 11 rooms are devoted to the art he has created this century, spent largely in Yorkshire, Normandy and London, perhaps the title chimes well with the year’s date and the most recent work of this seemingly indefatigable person. Indeed, “retrospective” is surely the wrong name to be given to the exhibition, as Hockney continues to create art at a prolific rate.
But what a delight to move from those astonishing darker-hued early works, such as the 1961 painting “We Two Boys Together Clinging,” which openly celebrates gay love at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain, to the explosion of light in the works he created after his move to Los Angeles in 1964. Seeing side by side such iconic pictures as the swimming pool paintings and the portraits of people like Christopher Isherwood and his partner Don Bachardy or the wonderful “Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy” (with its reversal of gender stereotypes) really brings to the fore the transformation inspired by America on both his color palette and his mind. I particularly enjoyed the wonder with which the young Yorkshireman seems to view something so banal as a line of sprinklers in the 1967 painting “A Lawn Being Sprinkled.”
All the remaining rooms, which chart Hockney’s more recent work, are marked by bright colors, even the slightly more generic smaller landscapes that he painted after his return to Yorkshire in the late 1990s. Nature and the changing seasons have dominated much of his later work, both in Yorkshire and in Normandy, where he spent the Covid lockdown years. He has also been able to experiment with much larger sizes, in such works as the glorious winter landscape “Bigger Trees near Warter or/ou Peinture sur le Motif pour le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique” from 2007, which has been hung in an appropriately cavernous gallery space. The outline of visitors to the gallery set against the silhouettes of the trees is like an art installation in itself.
Fans of his iPad paintings (one is pictured at the top of this page) and multimedia installations will not be disappointed. It is a particular joy to view the movement of rain falling in one of his Normandy paintings. But it is not simply nature-influenced art that we find in the later galleries. Hockney’s love of portraiture has continued right up to the present, including a wide range of self-portraits that chart his increasing age with an unsentimental eye. I was moved by the various portraits of his early muse, Celia Birtwell (Mrs. Clark in “Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy”), who has continued to sit for Hockney over their more than 50 years of friendship.
Other galleries are dedicated to his dialogue with other artists from the past, including Fra Angelico, Claude Lorrain, Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso and, in his recent work, Edvard Munch and William Blake. He remains fascinated by perspective, showcased best in his collage-style video installations of dancers (including the older Wayne Sleep) rehearsing in a room that is replicated by the gallery itself.
At the top of the building, Hockney’s glorious stage designs for various operas are displayed in an enormous room (Gallery 10), where visitors can stretch out on beanbags or benches and listen to music from the operas that he has staged so well, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling images of the set. After being on your feet on the many floors of this monumental exhibition, you will be relieved to have the chance to sit and enjoy.
The vast exhibition spaces of the Louis Vuitton Foundation are ideally suited to celebrating the sheer joyousness of Hockney’s art. Even if it may seem like bringing coals to Newcastle (or should that be to Bradford?) for a British-based viewer like me to travel to Paris for a Hockney exhibition, I urge you, wherever you live, to get to Paris before the end of August to see this unforgettable show.
See our list of Current & Upcoming Exhibitions to find out what else is happening in the Paris art world.
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