By 1962, the year David Hockney graduated from the Royal College of Art, he had already appeared in ten group exhibitions, acquired a dealer – the sassy John Kasmin – and had enough lustre to his name to be photographed by Antony Armstrong-Jones for the new Sunday Times colour magazine. So for more than six decades, Hockney has never known anonymity and never had to worry about showing his work.
The painter is now 87 and nothing has changed. Since 2020 there have been 32 exhibitions of his work, staged everywhere from the National Gallery in London to Washington DC, Tokyo, California, Ontario, Istanbul and across Europe. The world is currently Hockney mad. The biggest show yet has just opened at the Fondation Louis Vuitton (FLV) in Paris, “David Hockney 25”, a whopping retrospective featuring more than 400 works. Although the selection concentrates on the past quarter century of his career, it nevertheless reaches back to its earliest stages with Portrait of My Father (1955), the first painting Hockney ever sold (he telephoned his mother at home in Bradford to tell her: “Hello Mum, I’ve sold my Dad”), and takes in the major works that established his name, such as A Bigger Splash (1967) and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-71), before finishing with his most recent pictures, shown for the first time, inspired by Edvard Munch and William Blake.
It helps to fill 11 galleries of the Frank Gehry-designed FLV – a striking combination of vertical boat and flower petals around a gigantic bud on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne – that Hockney’s career has been defined by indefatigability. In the 1970s a dealer friend noted that: “He’s constantly thinking that he hasn’t worked hard enough,” a failing he has consistently sought to correct. Others put his single-mindedness differently. The fashion designer Ossie Clark, his long-time intimate, occasional lover, husband of Celia Birtwell and one of the sitters in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, dismissed Hockney pithily as a “selfish c***”. The artist himself has justified his self-centredness as a societal favour: “I am keeping modernism alive with my ideas about seeing and depicting.”
Whatever else drives him, it isn’t money: by the early 1980s his paintings were already fetching nearly $250,000, while in 2018, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) sold for $90.3m, a record for a work by a living artist. Nor is recognition driving him – that, too, came early: Tate acquired its first Hockney (it currently has 114 in various media), The First Marriage (A Marriage of Styles I), in 1963, and A Bigger Splash in 1981, and for good measure he appeared on Desert Island Discs in 1972, just ten years after leaving the RCA. Meanwhile, visitor figures for his exhibitions are eye-popping: 600,989 people flooded the Royal Academy in 2012 to see “A Bigger Picture”; the Tate’s 2017 retrospective attracted 478,082 visitors then a further 363,877 visitors when it moved on to the Met in New York, and another 621,000 when it finished off its tour at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. So Hockney continues to make art as he has always done, not for others but because he needs to for reasons within himself.
If image-making is what drives him still, the possibilities of technology are also an ongoing fascination. He is one of the great draughtsmen of the 20th century but has long been happy to lay aside his pencil to tinker with art made by whatever new toy came into view – Polaroid collages, photocopiers, fax machines, multiple high-res camera rigs, and his iPad (with Apple even devising bespoke software for him). Hockney is a proselytiser, claiming that artists through history have always made use of emerging technologies. While these tools may have helped him scratch his itch, they are to many viewers a distraction and have sidetracked him from his greatest strengths. The artist, who has been heavily involved in putting together the Paris exhibition, has included a selection of these diversions: they clearly remain important to him.
Indeed, Hockney’s curatorial role extends to the colour of the gallery walls and the illuminated pink mantra on the outside of the building: “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring.” He has witnessed several retrospectives before, the first as early as 1970, but when this one was proposed two years ago he doubted he’d be alive to see it. He currently requires 24-hour medical attention so the care he has taken with this exhibition suggests he doesn’t think he will witness a similar one again. It makes this show the authorised version.
Among other things, it is a reminder of just what a brave artist Hockney was. His We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), for example, painted while still at the RCA, was an unequivocal declaration of his gayness made at a time when homosexuality was illegal. He took the title, which amused him, from a newspaper report about two friends who became stuck on a cliff while mountaineering and needed rescuing. The artist Roger de Grey, head of painting at the RCA, commented on seeing this picture of two boys kissing: “Well I hope they don’t get any closer than that.” It was at this time that Patrick Procktor invited Hockney to a party at the Slade School of Art, telling him it was a drag ball. Hockney shaved his legs, donned a “Miss Bayswater” T-shirt over a pair of prosthetic breasts and turned up to find he was the only one in drag. His dyed blond hair was adopted after his first trip to the US in 1961 when he saw a television commercial for Lady Clairol: “Is it true blondes have more fun?”. And he attended his graduation ceremony in a gold lamé jacket.
Hockney was unconventional too in his painting choices. Although he tried abstraction – using it, bizarrely, to express his “militant vegetarianism”, with pictures in which patches of colour represented different vegetables – he quickly alighted on figurative painting. Abstraction, he has said, “can’t go anywhere. Even [Jackson] Pollock’s painting is a dead end.” Despite a passing fear of not seeming contemporary, he stuck with depicting the identifiable, for all the times favoured conceptual, abstract and performance art. If a pared-down aesthetic signified his modernity there was nevertheless a thoughtful engagement with the art of the past. Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy offers more than a nod to Thomas Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews (c 1750), while A Bigger Splash has both strong cubist overtones and similarities with the flat perspectives of early Italian painting.
This aspect of his artistic personality has caused him some disquiet. “I am very fed up with being a very public ‘art celebrity’,” he once said. “And I must be serious. I think it’s beginning to affect my own sanity.” He has indeed been serious in his conversations with long-dead painters, from Piero della Francesca and Hogarth to William Blake and Ingres, but his “art celebrity” – an appeal that embraces not just gallerists and museums but a devoted picture-viewing public – is based less on his recondite experiments than on joyous colour (prior to the early 1980s: “colour hadn’t seemed that important to me in painting”) and his landscapes.
This combination first appeared in Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio (1980), a six-metre-wide slice in which the eye follows the ribbon of road through the Hollywood Hills just as a car would cruise along it. It found its American apogee in A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998), a sumptuous, wall-size panorama that sits strikingly in one of two spacious galleries devoted to the earlier part of Hockney’s career. The mode now established, colour and landscapes (another reminder of the show is how Hockney has long liked to work on a large scale) became his default from the later 1990s when he started to make frequent trips from his Los Angeles base to his home county of Yorkshire and the Wolds: he settled there after his mother’s death in 1999.
In swapping citrus orchards and dry red rock for stands of trees and frothy hawthorn hedges (he likens the explosion of spring blossom to “Champagne poured over the bushes and everything seems foamy”), Hockney has linked his name indelibly to this part of rural England. The paintings, watercolours and iPad drawings are joyous, bright and show rapt attention to the changing seasons. The same traits are on display in his images of the Normandy countryside surrounding the house he bought not far from Caen in 2019: it was there he sat out the pandemic, drawing and drawing.
However, the problem with Hockney curating his own exhibition is that he includes too many of these pictures. They are quickly made and accessible but often interchangeable; they make for easy if not always fully rewarding looking. The supersize ones resemble the stage sets he has designed for operas – which are also in the show – but here pushed to the fore without the action in front of them. While the iPad drawings have the added disadvantage of being flat on the sheet when printed, they lack the interest of living brush strokes, and are often a Pantone shade too bright. En masse, each picture is less a resolved image than a component part of a greater whole – just as his dwarfing (12 metres wide) Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007) is composed of 50 canvases – micro-vistas that in themselves don’t always justify repeat viewings but need to be seen in suites.
Their inclusion in such profusion suggests that Hockney himself regards them as among his best work: a dispassionate outsider might disagree. This disconnect is even more obvious in his pictures of people rather than nature. The younger Hockney was a portraitist of extraordinary subtlety and finesse but the display here shows a poignant tailing off in his skills. The line that was once so precise has become, unsurprisingly given his frail health, wavering; the ability to capture a likeness and a look has waned. This diminution can be dated to 2018/19 when his control demonstrably starts to slip. For example, the presence of his portrait of Norman Rosenthal, made just last year, might be an elegant nod of thanks to his co-curator but it will do nothing for the reputation of either sitter or artist.
While a different guiding hand could have shown Hockney to better effect, this exhibition, with its massed ranks of paintings and its brilliant colours, is nevertheless a real spectacle. And perhaps the most admirable spectacle of all is Hockney’s undaunted urge to look and then record.
David Hockney 25
Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris, until 31 August
[See more: Picasso’s mistreated muses]
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025