Inside David Hockney’s Most Extensive Show Ever

Hockney, who is now 88, has become known as an artist who can’t resist the lure of new technologies, experimenting first with the camera lucida and fax machines, then with iPads and iPhones, and creating huge immersive installations that have travelled the world in the last decade. But he is at heart a superb painter, as this exhibition makes clear.

All the greatest hits are here: the remarkable Mr and Mrs Clark from 1971, in which the flamboyant dress maker Ossie and the textile designer Celia Birtwell cos play a conventional partnership; the stunning swimming pool pictures where Los Angeles is shown as a frictionless blue paradise, with something stirring in the depths; the double portraits that began with Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy in 1968.

Later on there are rooms of swirling 1990s American landscapes, wrought in fiery colors and finessed strokes; and others stacked with flower paintings or packed with portraits hung salon-style. In 2021, Hockney is still painting himself, using acrylics, and dressed in a natty checked suit and spotty tie. In 2023, he dashes off a wonderfully improvisational set of four studies of his companion Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima, with Tess the dog playing a starring role. The latest image is an iPad self-portrait. Depending on how you go round, it’s the last in the show.

The digital imagery certainly plays its part, not least in the landscapes made in Normandy during lockdown. Hockney found himself stuck there, having taken on a half-timbered farmhouse in the Pays d’Auge before Covid brought the world to a halt. He responded by making an iPad picture of the minutely evolving trees and fields every day and sending them to a select group of friends. There are 220 here. When the daffodils appear—a joyous eruption of yellow—he adds the line “Do Remember, they can’t cancel spring.” It’s pure Hockney to combine the essential and the explosive in one painting or quote.

That slogan now greets visitors to the Fondation, and speaks volumes for the optimism of an artist who has looked so closely at his surroundings and the people in it for decades and then shared it in his work. He is now confined to a wheelchair, and continually accompanied by two nurses. But he came to Paris from his London home to see the exhibition before it opened, and had been deeply involved in its preparation. “He even worked with the designer to choose the paint colors for the gallery walls,” says Suzanne Pagé, the Fondation’s artistic director and the head curator of the exhibition. “He followed it all—the catalogue, the choices of works, the installation—making corrections all the way.”

Sir Norman Rosenthal, the 80-year-old British writer and curator, was the guest curator. “Like all artists, he likes to be in control,” says Rosenthal. “But rightly so. He’s one of the spectacular ones—varied, inventive, consistent.” As if to prove this, the exhibition finishes with an immersive offering of ten operas he has designed over the years, with animated scenography surrounding the viewer, as the music of Mozart, Wagner and Puccini fills the room

For those who can’t get to Paris, Thames & Hudson has published an excellent accompanying catalogue, David Hockney. In it, an essay by Donatien Grau (the Musée d’Orsay’s 37-year-old head of programs) describes the process of sitting for a portrait. “He sat in the studio, an empty canvas in front of him. I wore a dotted scarf, a dark blue jacket, black trousers. It was fascinating to look at him looking at me…. When he was about to finish, he looked at the painting, then turned towards me smiling and said: ‘Your mother won’t like it.’” That’s Hockney in a nutshell: Humor, skill and detail inextricably intertwined.

David Hockney 25 is at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, until August 31.