A troubling paradox: David Hockney (*1937) is both universally popular – painter of swimming pools, sundrenched boys, and Californian houses – and a fundamentally misperceived artist. His work has always managed to defy cliché, not only through the sheer density of his output, but through its occasional dalliances with the ugly. Never outrightly rejecting beauty, but complicating it by layering formal innovation with personal narrative.

The exhibition dedicated to him by the Fondation Louis Vuitton allows us to grasp the scale of a journey that spans 1960s London to LA, the landscapes of Yorkshire to the countryside of Normandy. But as is often the case with Parisian cultural blockbusters, the experience is marred by crowds, alarms, and selfies. Moving from one painting to another becomes a struggle in a saturated atmosphere. There’s something ironic – even absurd – in seeing a mostly heterosexual audience marvel at a painter so openly queer. Because, yes, Hockney’s universe is gay, in every sense of the word: joyful, bright, but also openly homosexual, offbeat, dissonant. Quirky, as the English would say, with that gentle humor and proudly odd spirit.

View of “David Hockney 25,” Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2025. Photo: Marc Domage

From early works influenced by Art Brut to his garish, deliberately awkward landscapes, Hockney constructs a very British, delightfully mismatched language. Brazen violets, improbable oranges, acidic greens: a palette somewhere between Fauvism and Pop Art, full of tension and contrast. He doesn’t seek harmony – he crafts visual unrest, rhythm, organic imbalance.

His iPad series, such as “The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire” (2011), are, to be honest, visually quite weak – flat drawings of dull digital colors. And yet, there’s a paradoxical grace to them: a childlike joy in creating, drawing, trying again. These aren’t major works, but heartbeats. Pulses of life. At times, as when he revisits the baroque landscapes of Claude Lorrain (A Bigger Message, 2010), his painting turns heavy, withdrawn. At others, it lightens, becomes misty, almost dreamlike, close to Edvard Munch (Less Is Known than People Think, 2023). This is especially evident in the way he captures northern light and the loneliness of vast, open spaces. This tension between density and lightness, between pomp and fading, runs throughout his work. He knows how to paint a splash – which is harder than it seems. In A Bigger Splash (1967), with just a few white strokes and shattered lines, he renders the instant of impact, the violence of a dive, the suspension. A masterpiece.

After Munch: Less is Known than People Think, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 121.9 x 182.9 cm. Photo: Jonathan Wilkinson

A Bigger Splash, 1967, acrylic on canvas, 242.5 x 243.9 cm

One entire room is a video installation devoted to his theatre and opera sets – Tristan und Isolde, The Rite of Spring – where small, dancing figures wobble across like colorful toys. It’s an immersive cinematic vision, oscillating between megalomania and inspired DIY. It’s wildly exuberant.

Born into a working-class family in Northern England, Hockney entered the Royal College of Art in 1959, just as London was stirring with the first signs of the Swinging Sixties. He aligned with the Pop Art movement while managing to still carve out his own path. He spoke openly about his homosexuality at a time when it was still a crime in the UK and made the male body the center of a kind of inverted eroticism. In 1964, he moved to more sexually liberal California, discovering a new freedom of representation. No longer women-objects to be gazed at, but men – young, naked, vulnerable – paradoxically shielded by the very surface of the painting. In Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (1966), one man emerges from the water, head turned as though acknowledging the presence of someone. But there’s no interaction, just tension. The pool surface becomes a boundary, a mirror, a screen. It has the texture of crocodile skin, contrasting sharply with the clean lines of the painting. Another canvas, The Room, Tarzana (1967), left a mark on me: one of his lovers, nude, lying face down on a bed. You can see his ass. It’s simple, untheatrical, unfiltered. Just a body, light, a suspended moment. Intimacy made visible without ever being violated – that’s Hockney in a nutshell.

Bigger Trees nearer Warter, Winter 2008, 2008, oil on nine canvases, overall: 274.3 x 365.8 cm. Photo: Richard Schmidt

Blossom on a Tree, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 91.4 x 121.9 cm. Photo: Jonathan Wilkinson

In his later work, time becomes the true subject. He paints the same trees, the same paths, across seasons. In 2002, he turned to watercolor – a fragile, immediate medium – to capture shifting light, waiting, the stillness of the world. “The tree, especially in winter, seeks the light,” he writes. The tree becomes a mirror of the man, a figure of resistance against entropy. And there’s something comforting about imagining this charming, bespectacled man in pastel suits – still alive, still curious, still creating. And yet, one sometimes wonders if Hockney doesn’t know when to stop. His Normandy landscapes, like Blossom on a Tree (2023), start to repeat themselves: bouquets of flowers, half-timbered houses, overly idyllic countryside. Pleasant, sure – but the eye tires, and it starts becoming increasingly decorative.

With 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life (2013–16), Hockney stages a kind of frozen ball: friends, assistants, collectors, all seated in the same chair, against the same blue background. The repetition becomes ritual. The differences emerge in tiny details: an anxious glance, a clenched hand, a wrinkled suit. Each portrait is a fragment of inner theatre. Hockney watches, always from a distance. He doesn’t capture; he composes. He never stops turning painting into a mental, emotional, temporal space. But despite impressing with its generosity and virtuosity, the exhibition, spanning so many genres and styles, can at times overwhelm. This is the flip side of gigantism: too much of everything, everywhere makes for an aesthetic of saturation.

25th June 2022, Looking at the Flowers (Framed), 2022, photographic drawing printed on paper, mounted on five sheets of Dibond, overall:
300 x 518 cm. Photo: Jonathan Wilkinson

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“David Hockney 25”
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
9 Apr – 31 Aug 2025