I was very lucky recently to be able to go and visit the Hockney 25 exhibition at the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris. This is an exhibition of over four hundred of David Hockney’s works from 1955 to 2025, though mostly covering the last twenty-five years. Hockney himself has been involved in setting it all up and it’s his largest ever exhibition.
Many of the classics are there: A Bigger Splash, Mr and Mrs Clark and Perry, the completely wonderful Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, A Bigger Grand Canyon to name just a few.
There’s the moon room, a set of paintings of the night, in which Hockney took advantage of the iPad’s illuminated screen to paint in the dark. There are the series of paintings he made in Yorkshire and Normandy celebrating the seasons, in particular spring.
And then towards the end of the exhibition there’s an immersive room showcasing many of the sets he’s designed for operas over the years.
I’m not a huge fan of taking photos of paintings in galleries so I don’t have a lot of my own photos to share but if you visit the exhibition website you can see good images of many of the works I’ve mentioned and that I loved. (Much better images than you’ll ever get from standing in front of a painting, in everyone’s way, photographing it with your phone.)
What I love about Hockney is the joy. He’s able to paint joy, whether it’s a trip to Italy as a young man, the way a Yorkshire country lane changes through the seasons, the coming of spring in Normandy or the love he has for people.
This exhibition is an interesting contrast to the Barbara Walker exhibition I visited a few weeks ago in Bristol. Walker uses her art to inform and to campaign. It’s beautiful and it’s powerful and it’s important. Art can change people’s minds, which is why it’s always suppressed by regimes who don’t want people to have independent thoughts. I hugely admire artists who do this. Art can also be about what’s beautiful in the world, though. That isn’t hiding from reality or pretending bad things aren’t happening. If anything it’s a reminder of why it’s worth fighting for the world to be a better place. There’s too much that’s beautiful and wonderful in this world and in so many of the people who live in it to let it go to ruin without a fight. Hockney reminds us of this.
