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Telegraph
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
David Hockney 25, Fondation Louis Vuitton: Will transform how we think about this brilliant artist
Dressed in a flat cap and tweed suit (but, uncharacteristically, without a cigarette), David Hockney, 87, is whizzing on a mobility scooter around his colossal new retrospective in Paris. With more than 400 artworks produced, astonishingly, over seven decades, the exhibition is – fittingly, for an artist who relishes titles that contain the word 'bigger' – his biggest yet. What's it like for Britain's most popular living artist to see his career laid out in such glorious fashion? 'It's fantastic,' he tells me with a smile, eyes twinkling behind canary-yellow, round-framed specs. 'I'm still here!' 'Fantastic' is the 'mot juste'. Timed to coincide with his favourite season, as blossom erupts outside in the Bois de Boulogne, David Hockney 25 is a rousing, dopamine-unleashing celebration and summation of a brilliant, beloved artist's work. On the billowing silver exterior of the Louis Vuitton Foundation designed by his friend Frank Gehry (whose blue-eyed, crinkly-lipped portrait, with hands like red gloves, appears halfway through the show), Hockney's quasi-handwritten words are picked out in pink neon: 'Do remember they can't cancel the spring'. As (potential) swansongs go, it's remarkably uplifting. Yet, more than this, as signalled by the subtitle ('Less is Known than People Think') of two strange, spiritually intense new paintings at the end, fresh from Hockney's Marylebone studio (he moved to London from his half-timbered farmhouse in Normandy in 2023), the show may transform how we think about a figure occasionally rebuked for his escapism. On this evidence, Hockney is a complex, even (at times) melancholic artist, seemingly compelled – to my surprise – by a burning otherworldly yearning. There are 11 rooms, beginning with a pleasingly chunky, two-gallery synopsis of his career to the turn of the millennium, filled with many of his greatest hits (including 1967's A Bigger Splash, lent by the Tate), as well as a sombre 1955 portrait of his dark-suited father, like something by Édouard Vuillard (and the first painting he ever sold). Much of the rest of the exhibition dwells on his output over the past quarter century, with galleries devoted to landscapes executed in Yorkshire during the 2000s, as well as, from 2019, rural Normandy. I was snippy about some of Hockney's Yorkshire pictures when they appeared at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2012; the smaller works remain parochial and minor. But the grand paintings in which, say, hawthorns like gigantic squidgy chess pieces appear to undulate and dance while exuding creamy blossoms like squashed eclairs? They're radiantly weird. With its anthropomorphic purple tree stump, like a grumpy forest god surrounded by pupal orange streaks, Winter Timber (2009) is impregnated with supernatural, cosmic significance: beside a track, felled orange logs laid out like the yellow brick road lead the eye to a vortex of swirling blue branches, like a portal to another dimension. Few galleries could so suavely accommodate Hockney's Bigger Trees near Warter (2007), an oil painting on 50 canvases depicting a wintry coppice irradiated by uncanny, seemingly fluorescent reddish-pink. Throughout, artworks confound the notion that Hockney is nothing but a hedonist depicting sunshine and sex by the pool. A graffiti-like picture in the opening room, with two forms like bristly Weetabix depicting men urgently going at it, was painted in 1961, when homosexuality in Britain was still illegal; Berlin: A Souvenir (1962) seems to represent a nightclub frequented by wraiths. In a 2013 portrait, Hockney's partner, 'JP' (Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima), clutches his head as if bereft; nearby, in 15 grimacing self-portraits grouped together on a royal-blue wall, the artist appears, by turns, befuddled, plaintive, even vacant. In the final picture, he cups his ear, reminding us of his deafness, and, by extension, the inevitability of physical decline. Several Normandy landscapes depict raindrops plopping into ponds or sliding down a window's panes. One vast composition, created using an iPad, turns the setting sun into a volcanic explosion; elsewhere, Hockney portrays clouds like luminous smoke rings. A gallery of nocturnes depicts the artist's garden tinged with silvery lunar reflections. Spectral and mysterious, they're the antithesis of the Hockney we thought we knew.
The Guardian
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘A mutual love affair': David Hockney 25 retrospective makes a splash in Paris
Poised to open its doors on Wednesday, Paris's biggest art show of the year carries the humble title David Hockney 25. A more accurate description of its ambition would have been the name of the artist's best-known painting: A Bigger Splash. Purportedly focused only on the last quarter-decade of the Yorkshire-born painter's career, the 456 works on display at the Fondation Louis Vuitton's 11 vast galleries in fact span 1955-2025. The one-off exhibition includes acrylic paintings, iPad drawings and immersive video works, from Hockney's classic California swimming pool scenes via his Swinging Sixties portraits to the pastoral Yorkshire and Normandy landscapes of the later years, as well as unseen, William Blake-inspired spiritual paintings completed in the past two years. Announced by the British curator Norman Rosenthal as the most important show in the career of Britain's greatest living artist, and described by the architect Frank Gehry as 'the biggest show they have ever had' at the decade-old private museum, it also underscores Paris's efforts to reclaim from London its status as Europe's art capital. Born in Bradford in 1937, Hockney has over the course of his career been a resident in London, Los Angeles and the Yorkshire coastal town of Bridlington. In 2019, he settled in a 17th-century farmhouse in the Pays d'Auge countryside, south of Deauville, Normandy. The 2020 lockdown led him to produce a continuous 90m frieze of iPad paintings inspired by the Bayeux tapestry nearby. Entitled A Year in Normandie, it is again on show in Paris this week. The artist's move coincided with renewed French interest in the British artist after a large retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2017, followed by shows at the Galerie Lelong and the Orangerie museum in Paris, the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen and the Matisse museum in Nice. 'France and Hockney became a mutual love affair,' said Catherine Cusset, a French author whose 2018 'biographical novel', Life of David Hockney, is being reissued in an illustrated version this week. 'I think he felt at home here: he enjoys good food and good wine, and the French are more tolerant than England or California when it comes to his other big passion – smoking.' Cusset explained her country's view of the British artist: 'The great appeal of Hockney's paintings is that they are easy to understand. This was sometimes a criticism. In France, though, Hockney found a tradition of other painters giving an enchanting view of the world: Matisse, Bonnard, and his neighbour in Normandy, Claude Monet.' Yet an exhibition of the size and scale of David Hockney 25 can only in part be explained by mutual admiration. For the show, Fondation Louis Vuitton is loaning works from museums around the world – signature paintings such as A Bigger Splash and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy from the Tate, the panoramic A Bigger Grand Canyon from the National Gallery of Australia – creating transport and insurance costs that would be hard for other institutions to shoulder. The Gehry-designed private museum, sponsored by the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH and headed by one of the world's richest people, Bernard Arnault, opened in Bois de Boulogne in 2014. 'When the Fondation Louis Vuitton hosts a show these days, there is almost no competition', said Thaddaeus Ropac, an Austrian gallerist. The museum's most successful show to date, 2017's Icons of Modern Art, drew 1.3 million visitors. The opening of Fondation Louis Vuitton kickstarted a proliferation of similar private exhibition sites, such as the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, by the billionaire founder of luxury group Kering, François Pinault, which opened in 2021. The Fondation Cartier is setting up a large contemporary art space on the historic Place du Palais-Royal in Paris, right across from the Louvre, that will open to the public in autumn. 'Paris has developed in a way I used to think was not possible', said Ropac, who has galleries in Paris and London and commutes between the two European capitals. 'We haven't seen such a concentration of new museums anywhere else in Europe, or even in the US recently.' Britain remains the largest market for art in Europe by some distance: according to the 2024 Art Basel & UBS art market report, France's estimated share of the previous year's global art sales was 7% compared with Britain's 17. But the trend and the ambition are with the French capital. 'Paris used to be the art capital of the world in the early 20th century,' said Clément Delépine, the director of Art Basel Paris. 'Then we lost that status to London and New York. Now there's a shared assumption that we can collectively reposition our city.'
The Guardian
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hockney says he did not offer to paint King Charles during royal visit
Renowned artist David Hockney has said he did not offer to paint King Charles when the monarch visited his London home on Monday because he doesn't know him well enough. This is not the first time that Hockney has shied away from painting royalty. The 87-year-old also refused a number of offers to paint the late Queen Elizabeth II because he only paints people he knows. Speaking in an interview with the Times, before his latest art show, Hockney said of the king's visit to his Marylebone home: 'He came on Monday for about an hour. But I didn't offer to paint him.' Of Elizabeth II he said: 'It's difficult to do the majesty … I thought, she is a genuinely majestic figure, and I just couldn't see a way to do it.' The Bradford-born artist said in the interview that his pictures were better if he knew the subject 'really well', and he criticised Lucian Freud's portrait of the late Queen. He said: 'When you look at the queen, her skin is absolutely marvellous. It's very beautiful skin. Well, he didn't get that at all.' In the interview, Hockney explained that he had moved back to London from his former home in Normandy, France in 2023 because of 'intrusion', as 'people kept coming round'. The 87-year-old painter's latest show, called David Hockney 25, will open in Paris at the Fondation Louis Vuitton art museum and cultural centre. Hockney talked about the new paintings he had produced from his Marylebone home. One of his efforts, which he calls Play Within a Play Within a Play and Me with a Cigarette, is a pro-smoking message. 'I'm nearly 88 years old and I didn't think I'd be here. I'm still a smoker, but I'm surviving,' he said. 'I read in the newspaper the other day that lung cancer was going up and smoking was going down. Well, what did that tell me? It told me that it wasn't really smoking.' The outspoken artist also remarked on his perceived rise of officiousness: 'People are getting very … bossy. There's an awful lot of bossy people about now. They're little Hitlers, aren't they? And there's lots of them. Bossy bossy boots.' Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Hockney, who began working in the early 1950s, is best known for A Bigger Splash (1967), Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) (1972), and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1971). Even though Hockney did not paint the late Queen, he did make a stained glass window for her named the Queen's Window, which was unveiled in Westminster Abbey in 2018.
The Independent
29-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Artist David Hockney says he did not offer to paint King after house visit
Artist David Hockney has revealed he did not offer to paint the King when he visited his London home recently. The 87-year-old previously declined a number of offers to paint the late Queen Elizabeth II, because he does not paint pictures of people he does not know. Speaking in an interview with The Times, Hockney said of the King's visit to his Marylebone home: 'He came on Monday for about an hour. But I didn't offer to paint him.' Of the late Queen, he said: 'It's difficult to do the majesty she had, that's what I found difficult. I thought, she is a genuinely majestic figure, and I just couldn't see a way to do it.' The Bradford-born artist said in the interview that his pictures were better if he knew the subject 'really well', and also criticised Lucian Freud's portrait of the late Queen. He said: 'When you look at the Queen, her skin is absolutely marvellous. It's very beautiful skin. Well, he didn't get that at all.' In the interview, Hockney explained that he had moved back to London in 2023 because of 'intrusion', as 'people kept coming round'. Hockney, who began working in the early 1950s, is best known for paintings such as A Bigger Splash (1967), Portrait Of An Artist (Pool With Two Figures) (1972), and Mr And Mrs Clark And Percy (1971). Despite not painting the late Queen, Hockney did make a stained glass window for her named The Queen's Window, which was unveiled in Westminster Abbey in 2018 to commemorate her reign.
