Five of the Best - David Hockney in Paris

How to manage the colossal show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton

It’s big. As it should be. Most of us cannot remember a time when David Hockney wasn’t up there, a hero of innovation and colour. His optimistic art has been with us, witty and effervescent, for seventy years. His pictures were our posters on student walls; they have been on T-shirts, on the cover of the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations, on billboards, opera stages, theatre sets. Order of Merit, yellow Croc wearer, the blonde Bradford champion, defiant smoker, joker, lover of California and of men. David Hockney. His huge Paris show has just opened, and runs to August 31.

When I was in my 20’s, during a BBC interview for a job on an arts programme, I thought it would be radical, and interesting, to say that David Hockney was “over”. I got stuck in the argument. Understandably, I didn’t get the job. What madness. Far from being over, Hockney had barely begun, his fascination with history, perspective, trees, Normandy, the iPad, the camera obscura, all still things to come or grow.

David Hockney 25 opened yesterday at the giant Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. The greatest hits from his early years and the Yorkshire landscapes, all frothing blossom and giant trees, rock the basement; the remaining galleries across three stories take us through 25 years of portraits, film, Normandy, more Yorkshire, art history, dance and opera. It is a monumental experience. Four hundred works.

One visit isn’t really enough, it is exhausting and overwhelming. But not everyone can go to Paris twice in a summer, so if you are planning to visit once, here are five suggestions around which you might steer your visit. Obviously these are by no means definitive. This is a guide.

1. Flight Into Italy – Swiss landscape (1962)

This early painting shows an imagined description of an actual journey Hockney made in 1961 from France to Italy, over the Swiss Alps. It is cartoonish, playful, slightly rude about Switzerland (“that’s Switzerland that was” is written in the middle of the canvas), and reveals Hockney’s love of and fascination by landscape which he later expresses in an almost obsessional scale. It shows the joy of flight from England to the light and heat of Italy, and is also a sly reference to the canonical image of the Flight from Egypt, a connection with the heritage of European art Hockney has found so nurturing and inspiring throughout his life. This picture heralds many things to come.

2. Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), (1972)

Yes, I could have chosen Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (which hangs alongside), but this is a masterpiece, and a brilliant composition, done when Hockney was living in Santa Monica, California. It was to set the record for the highest auction price by a living artist when it was sold by Christie’s in 2019. Everything is in rhythm and plays off each other. The close focus vs a distant horizon, bodies clothed and unclothed, the solid patio and the moving water, the way the land falls away from the foreground to encompass vast blue mountains. The brilliant Californian light. So much is going on - it is a mysterious story, a formal study, and a play on water, light and heat. Wonderful.

Just look at the closeup for a bravura display of how to paint. Floating hair and sharp shoes and shadows.

3. Wind on the Pond (2023)

Fifty years later, Hockney is still fascinated by the effect of movement on a body of water, and landscape. This is a painting but relates to his series of images done via iPad at his home in Normandy, when, particularly during lock-down, he interrogated digital expression and employed it to deliver a spectacular array of work, mostly but not exclusively of his home and grounds, showing every angle of weather and season across the countryside. Hockney has always enthusiastically utilised a huge variety of technology, from Polaroid photos to iPads as part of his repertoire.

The restricted palette and horizon pay tribute to his insistence that this is what we ought to be looking at - not that, but this, now. And the lilypads with reflected tree is of course a continuation of a conversation with Claude Monet’s work.

4. The Massacre and the Problems of Depiction, after Picasso (2003)

I had never seen this image before. It is remarkable. It is a homage both to Francisco Goya’s depiction of the Third of May Massacre, where Spanish rebels were gunned down by Napoleon’s troops, and to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, but also stands on its own, a work of extraordinary power with a thundering emotional heft. Emotion, in Hockney’s work is sometimes muted by smooth brushwork and restrained gesture (Mr & Mrs Clark, for example). Not so here. This is a very moving picture, the limbs of the soldiers encroaching with such violence on the small child gathering flowers in the centre. The photographer is of course Hockney.

5. Katherine Dooley, London. (6 January 2000). Part of the series 12 Portraits after Ingres in a Uniform Style.

I am highlighting this wonderful painting, part of a series depicting security guards at the National Gallery in London. For alongside the digital fireworks and the stunning colour and wit, Hockney is and always has been a superb draftsman. These portraits were inspired by small portraits drawn by Ingres, and were done using a camera lucida, an optical instrument Hockney believes Ingres also used.

There is so much more! This film is simply of trees, from multiple cameras. He can’t stop looking at life, and he makes us look at it too.

The images beneath are from the documentation around the show. I was struck by how often Hockney wants us to see him in action, at work, holding the tools of his trade. What a great artist he is. What a memorable marathon a show this is. Go and see it in Go and see the show in your arty trainers. These were being worn by a lady ahead of me on the escalator. Superbe!

David Hockney is always at work….