In Paris, two magnificent spectacles have been wowing crowds this summer: the gloriously renovated Notre Dame Cathedral, and a joyous retrospective of British artist David Hockney’s work at the Louis Vuitton Foundation museum, “David Hockney 25.”
Fortunately for those who can’t make the show, which closes Aug. 31, a beautiful, coffee-table-sized art book, “David Hockney,” edited by Norman Rosenthal, captures much of the visual delight of the artist’s largest exhibition to date, which centers on his output over the past 25 years.
Hockney, who is one of the most popular artists of his time, is best known for paintings of sun-drenched California, which he called his “promised land” after arriving in Los Angeles from London in 1964. With brightly hued swimming-pool paintings like “A Bigger Splash,” which is included in the Paris show and in the book, his early work captured not only optimism and freedom but also yearning and a touch of melancholy.
Why We Wrote This
British painter David Hockney’s work conveys an openness to new ways of seeing the world. In a glorious coffee-table-sized art book, images of his recent pictures demonstrate the full flowering of his 60-year career.
The Paris exhibition confirms that Hockney’s work is both innovative and exuberant. Prominent among the more than 400 works displayed are landscapes that celebrate nature, including boldly colored quilts of rolling farmland and delicately green-shaded groves of trees in Yorkshire, England, and Normandy, France.
A series of 23 exquisitely expressive charcoal drawings from 2013 heralds the advent of spring on Woldgate Road in East Yorkshire, near where the artist was born in 1937, and showcases his remarkable range.
Other treats of the show include a recent animated video that Hockney overlaid on images of his 1980s set designs for opera productions. Several new, previously unexhibited paintings are also on display – a 2023 self-portrait and two paintings titled “Less Is Known Than People Think,” one inspired by a drawing by Edvard Munch, the other by William Blake’s illustrations.
One of the many joys of Hockney’s art is spotting his references to masterpieces from different eras and painters.
I first became enamored with his work in London’s Tate gallery when I was a teenager. I happened upon his painting “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy” (1971), and it so intrigued me that I visited it repeatedly. I didn’t know then that the nearly life-size double portrait of the artist’s newly married (and soon to be divorced) friends – fashion designer Ossie Clark and textile designer Celia Birtwell – with their white cat was inspired by both 15th-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck’s “The Arnolfini Portrait” and 18th-century artist William Hogarth’s “A Rake’s Progress.” Nor did I realize that Hockney had broken with wedding-portrait convention by painting the bride standing and the groom seated.
I also had no inkling that over the next 50 years, I would make a point of seeing Hockney’s shows whenever I could: in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Paris.
It has been an abiding pleasure to track this artist’s evolution through his themes: beloved landscapes; trees captured in various states of dress and undress in all seasons and weather; unsparing self-portraits that confront aging; and kinder portraits of his inner circle of friends over the years.
The exhibition and book make it clear how much of Hockney’s work is inspired by his favorite artists – including “Four Dancers” (2018), after Henri Matisse, and multiple paintings of hay bales and sunflowers that evoke Vincent Van Gogh. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Hockney has focused in the past 25 years on the English and French countrysides rather than on social or political issues.
Hockney has always been an innovator and pathbreaker – and, well into his 80s, he still is. He started using technology, including office photocopiers and computer-drawing software, to enhance his work in the late 1980s, and was an early adopter of iPhones and iPads as artistic tools.
He has long been interested in employing inventive and often tricky reverse perspectives as a way of including the viewer in a work of art. Digital technology has allowed him to play with this on a larger scale, and I was happy to see that the book includes two of his more mind-boggling works from 2018: In “Pictures at an Exhibition,” a group of people sits on wooden folding chairs in a large exhibition space, chatting and gazing at four of Hockney’s nine-part, brightly colored, geometric paintings. “Pictured Gathering With Mirror” depicts the same people facing a mirror instead of Hockney’s paintings – resulting in simultaneous frontal and rear views of them, which Hockney achieved by photographing his subjects from multiple perspectives and then making digital composites. In both pieces, Hockney, the master illusionist, leans against a wall.
In 2020, during the pandemic lockdowns, Hockney produced a series of 220 iPad paintings of spring as it unfolded in Normandy. These were published as the book “220 for 2020,” with the uplifting reminder: “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring.” New iPad drawing apps and Photoshop have also enabled him, with the help of his partner, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, and his assistant, Jonathan Wilkinson, to produce “A Year in Normandy” (2020), a monumental frieze inspired by the medieval Bayeux Tapestry, a 230-foot-long depiction of the Norman conquest of England.
What’s the key to Hockney’s enormous popularity? Bernard Arnault, president of the Louis Vuitton Foundation, writes in an introduction to the book that Hockney exudes optimism. Suzanne Pagé, the foundation’s artistic director, touts the artist’s curiosity: “With his unique ability to marvel at the simplest things,” she writes, “Hockney becomes a vector of happiness as soon as he picks up a brush, a pencil, or a tablet.”
For me, whether it’s the winding purple road in “Garrowby Hill” (1998 and 2017) or the enormous, showstopping “Bigger Trees Near Warter or/ou Peinture sur le Motif Pour le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique” (2007), a patchwork of 50 canvases painted from multiple perspectives, his work conveys an exciting openness to new ways of seeing the world.
By zeroing in on what makes Hockney happy, this retrospective pulses with life, jumping off the walls (and pages). Viewers feel included and embraced. It’s an achievement worth celebrating.
