A plea for painting: David Hockney 25, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, reviewed

Spectator

31-07-2025

The exploding sails of Frank Gehry's Louis Vuitton building in Paris are currently packed with the exhilarating visual explorations of the octogenarian artist David Hockney.
The exhibition begins with a roomful of the paintings that made Hockney famous in the 1960s: his graffiti-style canvases, packed with secret codes and illicit kisses. The next gallery is full of the very different paintings that made him even more famous: swimming pools in sunshine and boys sprawled on beds. Gays straight on, square to the picture frame – images, pure and simple; no hidden hints, no text.
This gallery also contains a couple of the portraits that further spread his fame. Sadly, none of the drawings for these are included. In his painting of Christopher Isherwood, his bushy eyebrows curtain his eyes, but in the drawing, you see one pupil glaring out. The intensity of the writer's intelligence is lost in the softer brushwork, but caught in Hockney's darting, edgy line. Hockney is a superb draughtsman, and drawing is something he does all the time, but you'd barely know it from this exhibition. The occasional portrait sketch is included, and these are among the most moving images in the show, above all the drawing of his sister Margaret in 2013.
The main part of the exhibition is, nevertheless, an extraordinary visual feast: vast landscapes, panoramas and flowers in acrylic. And between the gallery displays, there are films and records of other projects – his opera sets and obsession with the history of perspective. One aspect of his work, apart from drawing, is however unfortunately nearly absent: photography. Only one is included, at the very end: 'Pearblossom Highway' (1986), a fascinating assembly of over 800 snaps of everything he could see from the litter at his feet to the mountains in the distance. The technique he then developed of collaging multiple images to create a whole scene explains why so many of his wall-size paintings are made up of mosaics of smaller eyefuls.
Photography is a key to understanding Hockney's art. It was his first interest in visual mechanisation, which flowered later with his work with iPads. I was once in his studio in 1995 when he was making a print of a photo he'd just taken of a vase of sunflowers propped up next to a painting that he'd done of the same subject as a get-well card. The painting, due to a trick of perspective, looked as though it was standing in front of the photo, radiating brightly in real space. I said he should call the print 'Photography is dead. Long live painting.' He did.
This whole exhibition can be seen, in a way, as a plea for painting, during an era when painting was being marginalised. But there is room for his iPad work too. The drawback here is that handcraft on the iPad is limited; lines drawn on it can express a kind of feeling I guess, but textures brushed in with a stylus usually look impersonal, manufactured. There's a room of these works near the end. My attention was held by one of a group of winter trees standing in a field of white tulips (one red). Their presence reminds us of the Hockney quote that's blazoned on the side of the building as we go in: 'Do remember they cannot cancel spring'. The work is called 'Small Trees' (2023).
Then, in a tiny dark room at the very end, there are four paintings painted specially for this show. And words are back in them, too. In his painting 'After Blake' – hanging below the steps that repeatedly spell out the phrase: 'Less is known than people think' – red curtains part to tell us 'It's the now that is eternal'. He painted himself painting himself in the centre of 'Play Within a Play Within a Play and Me with a Cigarette' (2024-25), between some daffodils and the bare sprig of a tree. There are no words in this picture, except for those on his lapel badge which read 'End Bossiness Soon'. Hockney is again spelling out what he really thinks and feels, as he did when he started, in his shadowy, pleading, gay graffiti. In this self-portrait, his eyes, for the first time, are lowered. They seem to say: let me be myself, as I face death; the deeply moving closing of an extraordinarily creative life.