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Forbes
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
David Hockney In Paris: The Largest, Most Joyful Exhibit Worth The Trip
David Hockney, Untitled, 22 July 2005. Oil on canvas. 'David Hockney 25,' the just-opened exhibit at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, is the largest to date of the British artist featuring more than 400 works, including some never seen before. A once-in-a-lifetime experience that certainly merits the trip to Paris and already numbered among the blockbuster exhibitions of the year, it is also a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Fondation Louis Vuitton and will be open until August 31. Opened at its entrance by an appropriately hopeful slogan in pink neon in these times of turmoil and uncertainty — 'Do remember they can't cancel spring' — the Hockney exhibition is an experience that connects visitors with the world through an array of joyful, colorful, inspiring paintings, i-pad drawings and sometimes spectacular videos. A Year in Normandy, chair, David Hockney, 2020 'Inside and outside the soaring spaces of the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, everything is in bloom, a joyful vision and a record of a life in art lived with passionate curiosity, attention to the human condition and reverence for the natural world,' the New York Times enthuses in a review. It's the most extensive retrospective ever dedicated to the 87-year-old painter, featuring works from 1955 to 2025 and that, despite its sheer amount, as Le Monde's critic writes that 'you find yourself thinking it's not enough.' The Guardian's critic found the the show 'so moving, I had tears in my eyes.' David Hockney, Play Within a Play Within a Play and Me with a Cigarette, 2025. Acrylic on canvas with collage. This exceptional exhibition curated by Norman Rosenthal, former director of the Royal Academy in London, has been organized according to the artist's choices and instructions, and in addition to a major collection from his studio and his foundation assembles loans from international, institutional, and private collections. It includes works created using a wide, delightful and often astonishing variety of techniques — oil and acrylic paintings, ink, pencil, and charcoal drawings — as well as digital works across photographic, computer, iPhone, and iPad devices — and immersive photo and video installations. Apple Tree 2019. Acrylic on canvas. David Hockney, 27th March 2020 'He himself chose, after presenting some of his legendary early work, to open the exhibition with the last 25 years' production, thus offering an immersion in his world, spanning seven decades of creation,' the Louis Vuitton museum explains. 'He wanted to personally follow the design of each sequence and each room.' As described by Le Figaro: 'This painter, so English down to his bold pate and colorful attire, navigates with a touch of impatience in his 'electric chair,' gazing longingly at the hanging of this dazzling exhibition. His two nurses bring him his coke, but he lights his beloved cigarettes alone, with the same dandyish gesture he's always had. Vitality lurks like a volcano not yet extinguished.' At the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris' Bois de Boulogne, the explosion of colorful, relatable, joyful and immersive works illuminate the 12 rooms dedicated to the show, communicating the artist's joie de vivre and bringing smiles of delight - and sometimes even gasps - to observers. It's the satisfaction of remembering that nature offers infinite inspiration, if one simply looks. David Hockney: A room of portraits in many different styles, welcomes visitors. David Hockney, The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 "David Hockney 25" shows the constant renewal of the artist's subjects and modes of expression and his exceptional ability to reinvent his art. Initially a draftsman, then a master of all academic techniques, he is today a champion of new technologies. Born in 1937 in Bradford, an industrial town in northern England, Hockney started painting at a young age, his creative universe spanning seven decades that make him one of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. As a preamble, the exhibit starts with emblematic works such as the Portrait of An Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972, and his series of double and single portraits. Then, nature assumes an increasingly important place in Hockney's work from the 1980s to the 1990s before his return to Europe. The core of the exhibition concentrates on the past 25 years, spent mainly in Yorkshire, Normandy and London, a celebration of the landscape, the spectacular explosion of spring and the changing seasons to culminate with the winter landscape Bigger Trees near Water or/ou Peinture sur le Motif pour le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique, 2007, loaned by London's Tate Museum. David Hockney, Bigger Trees near Warter, 2007.' Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972. Acrylic on canvas. During the same period, David Hockney painted friends and relatives in acrylic or on iPad while also working on self-portraits. The exhibition features some 60 portraits shown alongside his 'portraits of flowers.' Created on a digital tablet but displayed in traditional frames, the works have an intriguing effect. This is evident in Looking at the Flowers (Framed), 2022, where they are shown together on the wall. David Hockney, 25th June 2022, Looking at the Flowers. Photographic drawing printed on paper Seeing them in that painting and then recognizing them hung around the room radiates joy to visitors of all ages. Hockney is a reliable 'porteur de bonheur ' with his blossoming trees, multicolored flowers and vibrant landscapes. 'You can learn a lot in this exhibition – not just about photography and the human eye but art history and perspective' writes the Guardian's reviewer. 'He show us how beautiful the world is in spite of those who try so hard to ruin it.' David Hockney, 24th February 2021, Red, Yellow and Purple Flowers on a Blue Tablecloth. iPad painting printed on paper, mounted on aluminium David Hockney, 30 Sunflowers, 1996. Oil on canvas. 'Day after day, season after season, the artist captures the light variations,' the curators explain. 'A series of acrylic paintings is on display featuring a highly singular treatment of the sky, animated by vibrant touches, that subtly evoke the work of Van Gogh.' The final room on the top floor feels more emotional in its joyful cornucopia of color. It unveils David Hockney's most recent works, painted in London, where he has lived since July, 2023. These enigmatic paintings are inspired by Edvard Munch and William Blake: After Munch: Less is Known than People Think, 2023, and After Blake: Less is Known than People Think, 2024, in which astronomy, history and geography cross paths with spirituality, according to the artist. Here, also, appears 'Play Within a Play Within a Play and Me With a Cigarette' (2025) , his latest self-portrait in his London garden painting the same image we see, as the daffodils around him announce spring. David Hockney: After Blake: Less is Known than People Think, 2024 Giverny by DH, 2023. Acrylic on Canvas. Nearing the end, new works are placed that engage the spectator in a video at the artist's studio, transformed into a dance hall where musicians and dancers are regularly invited to perform. Passionate about opera, Hockney also reinterprets the set designs he has been creating since the 1970s in a spectacular new multimedia, polyphonic creation where visitors are immersed in a musical and visual piece. David Hockney 25 is at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, until August 31. Tickets are available here.
New York Times
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
It's Springtime in Paris for David Hockney
Inside and outside the soaring spaces of the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, everything is in bloom. 'Do remember they can't cancel the spring,' reads a pink neon sign above the museum's entrance — a hopeful phrase that the English artist David Hockney sent to his friends, along with a drawing of daffodils, during the coronavirus pandemic. The foundation's exhibition, 'David Hockney 25' is the painter's largest to date. While its title indicates a focus on his most recent 25 years of work, it feels like an overview of his whole career. It's a joyful vision, and a record, of a life in art lived with passionate curiosity, attention to the human condition and reverence for the natural world. Born in 1937 in Bradford, an industrial town in northern England, Hockney started painting at a young age and impressed locals with a 1955 portrait of his father. The small canvas, tightly composed and painted in muted tones, is a far cry from the huge, raucously colored works that have come to define Hockney's oeuvre. But it brims with a painstaking humanity, captured in his father's alert expression, his tightly clasped hands and his energetic posture. This work opens the exhibition, whose first two rooms lead viewers through Hockney's quick, and frankly astonishing, evolution as a painter. Works he made in London during the late 1950s and early '60s mix styles and aesthetics with abandon. Pop mingles with postwar European 'art informel'; graffiti and collage stray into surrealist critiques of domesticity. Even as homosexuality was illegal in the Britain (it was decriminalized for men over 21 in 1967), Hockney painted relationships between men. 'Berlin: A Souvenir' (1962) shows a hedonistic abstraction of male figures — nude, in silhouette, about to embrace — merging and indistinct as forms. 'Two Men in a Shower' (1963) and 'Boy About to Take a Shower' (1964) show their subjects in intimate moments, naked bodies rendered in impressionistic flesh tones, as if colored by emotion or desire. When he lived in Los Angeles, from 1964 to 1998, Hockney produced some of his best-known portraits: romantic pairs, erotic interiors and outdoor scenes painted with clarity, bathed in soft California light. A 1968 painting, 'Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy,' shows the writer Isherwood and his partner in matching armchairs. Bachardy's head is turned toward Isherwood, in a scene of stunning tranquillity that mixes loosely painted figures with detailed surroundings. 'A Bigger Splash' (1967) has the same beguiling flatness and Los Angeles palette, but here the figure has disappeared, and we see only its wake. A giant spray of water rises from the otherwise placid surface of a blue pool. We never see who plunged in just seconds before. The essence of Hockney's work is the attempt to capture the animating force of life — in the faces of friends and loved ones, or in a blossoming tree, changing season or night sky. Just before the turn of the century, Hockney moved back to Yorkshire County, where he grew up. He stayed for a little more than a decade, turning his eye to the familiar, inexhaustible landscape of his childhood. In these paintings, hills roll, roads twist and turn, trees shed and sprout foliage, fields are golden and russet patchworks, light illuminates dense forests in otherworldly crimson and fuchsia. A series of paintings of hawthorn trees in blossom show the flowers surging in dense, roiling masses, pouring along the roadside. A wall text for 'Hawthorn Blossom Near Rudston' (2008) describes Hockney's obsession with the hawthorn's annual blooming, which arrives unpredictably at a moment he calls 'action week.' At its appearance each year, no matter where he was at the time, the artist would drop everything to return to Yorkshire and paint the bountiful white flower, frothing, Hockney has said, like 'champagne poured over everything.' Despite their British settings, the otherworldly hues and writhing lines of works like 'Felled Trees,' 'Bigger Trees Near Warter' (both 2008) and 'Untitled No. 2 (The Arrival of Spring)' (2011), recall the Post-Impressionism of Vincent Van Gogh, or the symbolism of Maurice Denis. Both artists, like Hockney, believed that nature possessed infinite inspiration, and that any single view holds within it the entirety of the world: One must simply look. A room of portraits hung salon style presents the human figure as equally compelling. The walls teem with faces and forms painted in wildly different styles, a testament to Hockney's range as well as his sensitivity. In 'Charlie Scheips' (2005), the subject, an American curator, leans casually against a wall, the lines of his body painted energetically with a realist, Alice Neel quality. 'Margaret Hockney, 14 February 2013,' shows Hockney's sister, carefully sketched in charcoal. The artist himself peers out at us from 'Self Portrait, 20th June 2022,' customarily bespectacled and dressed in flashy attire, a wry smile on his face as if to say, 'I'm still here.' Hockney's lavish attention to surface and detail make the exhibit's transition to his many 'iPad paintings,' his computer drawings printed on paper, and his oddly conceived 3-D drawings somewhat jarring. A collection of 220 iPad works called 'Four Years in Normandy' (2019-23) are the most persuasive: A room of prints big and small, as well as screens with shifting images, harness the restlessness of the pandemic lockdown years, and show Hockney working at great speed en plein-air. A grid of 15 self-portraits from 2012 is likewise affecting — a reminder that the self, too, is relentlessly fluid. In other parts of the show, Hockney's use of technology seems random at best, or lazy at worst, if only because most of his work is so considered and exquisite. A trio of ungainly 'photographic drawings' from 2018 are effectively experiments in Photoshop. Each shows a large room filled with people sitting or standing, sometimes in conversation, sometimes lost in contemplation. The technological process used to model each figure, a wall text says, forces us to observe them more closely, 'unlike traditional photography.' Another text, for a video of roadside foliage made with multiple cameras, compares the work to Dürer's botanical studies. Maybe. Or maybe not. But alongside these forays, Hockney is still, fortunately painting. The exhibit ends with a series of new works inspired by Edvard Munch and William Blake, both of whom painted transcendent visions of the world. 'Play Within a Play Within a Play and Me With a Cigarette' (2025) shows Hockney in his London garden. He is hard at work on a version of the very image we see before us. Though the trees are still bare, the daffodils, to his left are in bloom. It must be spring.
South China Morning Post
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Biggest David Hockney exhibition ever opens in Paris featuring around 400 artworks
Increasingly frail but with undimmed passion, Britain's David Hockney has put aside his health worries to shape in Paris what he describes as the biggest exhibition of his vast career. Advertisement With around 400 works over four floors, drawn from museums and private collections worldwide, the exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Foundation is a stunning tribute to one of the world's bestselling living artists. Although titled 'David Hockney 25' and mostly focused on the last quarter-century of his life, it also contains paintings from his early career, as well as his blockbuster time in California in the 1960s. In the last of 11 rooms there are several unseen creations from the past two years, including a self-portrait in acrylic and a striking meditation on the afterlife inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy. Self-portraits of British painter David Hockney at 'David Hockney 25'. Photo: AFP Artworks on display at 'David Hockney 25'. Photo: EPA-EFE '[The show] has enabled him to look back in a positive way,' said Norman Rosenthal, guest curator and a long-time friend of Hockney, ahead of its opening to the public on April 9. 'He's very, very happy with the exhibition.'
Jordan Times
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Jordan Times
Frail David Hockney celebrated in vast Paris retrospective
A visitor looks at paintings by British painter David Hockney ahead of the opening of the exhibition titled 'David Hockney 25' at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, on Monday (AFP photo) PARIS — Increasingly frail but with undimmed passion, Britain's David Hockney has put aside his health worries to shape what he describes as the biggest exhibition of his vast career. With around 400 works assembled over four floors, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris has put on a stunning tribute to one of the world's best-selling living artists. Although titled 'David Hockney, 25' and mostly focused on the last quarter-century of his life, it contains paintings from the very start of his career, as well as his blockbuster time in California in the 1960s. In the last of 11 rooms, there are several unseen creations from the last two years, including a self-portrait in acrylic and a striking meditation on the afterlife inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy. 'It's enabled him to look back in a positive way,' Norman Rosenthal, guest curator and a long-time friend of Hockney, told AFP ahead of the opening to the public on Wednesday. 'He's very, very happy with the exhibition.' Hockney, 87, insisted on overseeing the show, even taking an interest in the colour of the walls and sending back corrections for the texts written to inform visitors. 'He says it is the biggest exhibition of his career,' Louis Vuitton Foundation curator Suzanne Page told AFP. 'He's been very involved.' Twilight years Born in 1937 to working-class parents in the northern English town of Bradford, Hockney has painted everything from the fields of his native Yorkshire to the sun-soaked private homes of California. The Paris show includes an entire room of portraits, as well as vivid landscapes and memorable moonlight scenes that he produced while living in Normandy, northern France, from 2019 to 2023. There are also touches of his trademark humour. In his most recent self portrait he is smoking a cigarette and wearing a yellow badge that reads 'End Bossiness Soon'. The subtitle for the exhibition reprises a line he wrote to friends during the COVID-19 lockdowns when sending them pictures from Normandy: 'Do remember they can't cancel the spring.' But there are also hints of a man in his twilight years contemplating his mortality — and perhaps his last major show. An evolving digital creation of a sunrise in Normandy, which he produced like many others on his iPad, concludes with a quotation from French writer Francois de La Rochefoucauld. 'Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long,' it reads. Now in a wheelchair and with 24-hour care at his home in London, Hockney told The New York Times in a recent interview that he was grateful to be alive. 'Even last year, I thought I wouldn't be here,' he said. 'But I still am.' He travelled to Paris ahead of the opening this week and was spotted around the elaborate Frank Gehry-designed Louis Vuitton Foundation wearing one of his classic colourful tweed suits. Having steadily lost his hearing in recent decades, he stayed in a private room during the opening party on Monday, which was attended by French first lady Brigitte Macron among other VIPs. Smoking ban Some of his more recent work, including the iPad renderings from Normandy, have drawn mixed reviews but the exhibition also contains some of the classics from his portfolio that are usually in private hands. These include the enigmatic 'Portrait of An Artist (Pool with Two Figures)', which depicts Hockey's former lover staring into a Californian pool. It sold for $90.3 million at auction in New York in 2018, briefly setting a record for a living artist. Last year, six paintings by Hockney appeared in the top 100 most valuable works acquired at auction, according to data from the art market consultancy Artprice. Rosenthal, one of Britain's most respected art figures, speaks of Hockney in the same breath as Picasso or Monet. 'I think this exhibition proves that his work over 60 years has a level that never changes,' he explained. 'There's incredible variety and yet amazing consistency.' And Hockney continues to produce. 'He's reached a certain age and he's aware of it. He's a great smoker but I think he wants to go on,' Rosenthal continued. 'He paints every day.' A photo of Hockney holding one of his beloved Camel cigarettes featured on posters advertising the show, which have been banned from the Paris metro for contravening anti-smoking laws. He described the decision as 'complete madness'. 'David Hockney, 25' runs until September 1, 2025.
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.
