‘David Hockney 25’ Is an Ode to His Restless Curiosity and Unmistakable Style

In David Hockney’s 1963 painting Play Within a Play, a painted performer stands on a stage, his face and hands pressed fleshily against a pane of plexiglass installed to float right in front of the canvas. It’s a funny joke, a good representation of the now 88-year-old Hockney’s impish and very British sense of humor and a visually impressive example of his masterly technique (the curtain hanging behind the man looks like it’s suspended over the worn-out boards of a real stage). It’s also an early example of the artist’s lifelong explorations of “the small space between art and life.”

Sixty years later, Hockney hasn’t lost that sense of humor or the distinct style and overwhelming power as a painter, photographer and prolifically inventive and eclectic artist that has let him explore those spaces so deeply. They’re all on full display at Fondation Louis Vuitton in “David Hockney 25,” a seven-decade retrospective developed closely with the artist himself and focused, to a degree, on his most recent quarter-century of creative output.

At the edge of the Bois du Boulogne to the west of Paris in the foundation’s monumental Frank Gehry-designed glass and metal sailing ship of a museum, the show of more than 400 of his works sprawls over eleven rooms and three floors, touching on nearly all the subjects Hockney has explored and the mediums in which he’s worked and continues to work.

The California years

In 1964, when he was in his late 20s, Hockney moved to California for the first time. He knew “instinctively” that he would like the place and said while flying over San Bernardino for the first time that he was “more excited than he’d ever been before.” It was in liberated California that he would paint some of his most famous and enduring works.

In 1972, Hockney finished Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) and Bigger Splash, both of which are on display here. In the first, a realistically rendered man with carefully assembled hair—like the hero of a romance novel—stands in front of lush flowing hills, gazing down into a swimming pool at a hazy swimmer whose hair flows in an undefined tangle of color, body painted by the sparkle of the light refracting the pool into turquoise, aquamarine and blue.

In the second, the scene is framed by white canvas space that evokes the “format of the recently launched Polaroid. ” The only movement is in the splash from the title. Behind it, a flat California pool scene is bathed in the brightness of the sun beating down from overhead, casting slim shadows and highlighting vivid colors.

Then in the center of the painting there’s the splash: in one dense spurt to the left of the splash, small white dots like a galaxy, with flecks of white “W”s like birds flying into the space in between. “Très orgasmique,” a Frenchman laughed on a muggy June afternoon while looking at the painting. But also: a volcanic explosion, electricity, the wings of a dove. It is so clean, so California, it feels like a languid West Coast summer. “Bigger,” Hockney notes, “refers to the size of the painting, not the splash.”

In the late 1990s, Hockney returned to America. Here, his skill as a painter of overwhelming, imaginative landscapes is on display at the height of his powers in A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998). Below the horizon, pools of polka-dotted color collect at the bottom of the canyon—dark red-green, light green, orange—flowing like magma. Orange rock tapers over to the right third of the canvas until it explodes into polka-dotted purple, green and bright violent dots.

Wavy branches off the trees, a recurring Hockney hallmark, are posed artfully and outlined by defined highlights of color that give them a staccato sculptural look. But step back from the canvases, and the detail looks much more solid and cohesive, blending into a denser impression somewhere between memory and desire. (I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon with my own eyes, but after being in front of Hockney’s canvases, it feels like I have.)

The Yorkshire years

Much of the exhibition focuses on Hockney’s time in Yorkshire. After his mother died, Hockney returned to his native land and, starting in 2003, spent a decade capturing the overflowing verdant paths, hills and trees of the countryside there.

Bigger Trees Nearer Water (2008) is a fine example of this work. Here, there’s an unabashedly impressionistic swirl of white and blue clouds encircling a sphere of lush, gorgeous woods—dark and light swirls of green texture and polka dots broken up by orange-brown wood and branches.

As your eye follows the pink road forking from the bottom of the 3 x 3’ canvases making up this painting along the sides of the forest, it feels movement in the streaks of overwhelming color composing the road it takes to the left.

On the other side of the room, there’s another version of Bigger Trees Nearer Water from the same year, but this time in winter. It’s an elegant and fun curatorial choice. You can stand in the middle of the room and swivel back and forth between the lush summer copse of woods, profusely dense and alive, and the denuded complexity of the winter branches.

The iPad paintings

The exhibition also includes Hockney’s iPad paintings, which he often used to capture quick, immediate impressions of whatever caught his eye. Many, however, are displayed on flat paper, and there’s something missing in these, even though they have all the compositional inventiveness that I love in Hockney. When you see them displayed on screens, you immediately notice what they’re missing in their analog form. The glow of the screen brings out the life Hockney saw behind the colors as he painted them for the first time.

Artful lighting brings this effect to light in the Moon Room, where Hockney’s images of Christmas trees from December 2020 seem to spill out of the prints. The room is darkened, with diffuse beams falling onto the glow of the moon, or window light spilling onto grass, or the Christmas star topping a dark fir. They pulse and they glow.

One of the most impressive digital compositions on display is La Pluie, a video installation showing an animated downpour in the foreground of a waterlogged country scene. It’s a four-minute loop painted on an iPad, and the movement of the rain captures the texture that’s missing from the printed-out computer drawings.

La Pluie captures the muggy haze of a long, heavy rain. The shimmer and glow from the stream’s light refract blurrily through the streaks of the raindrops, like they’re falling on a window we’re looking out of, emulating the way light smears as it becomes waterlogged. Paired with the soft sound of rain falling on the glass ceiling on the June day I went to the gallery, the effect is very pleasant, and you can find yourself sitting there for quite a while.

David Hockney today

The French historian René Grousset once described civilization as “one part technical progress, and one part spiritual progress.” Hockney’s work over the years has evolved in a similar manner. Obsessed with learning the lost techniques of the old masters like Caravaggio, Velázquez and Da Vinci, Hockney embarked on a deep study of their works and in 2006 published Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. The book is stuffed with the fruits of years of Hockney’s research into the optical wizardry of these painters, where he details his theories on the lenses he speculates some painters like Caravaggio used, as well as examples of his own worthy attempts to recreate these masterpieces.

Near the end of the exhibition, at one of the uppermost points of the gallery, there’s a room showing Hockney in conversation with some of these painters across the ages.

This room shows the depth of Hockney’s references and influences—here we find his recreations of Flemish masters, his take on Picasso’s painting of the Korean massacre, Van Gogh’s chairs and sunflowers. There are Hogarth’s eerie stylized dreamscapes captured through Hockney’s eye and even a vast homage to Claude Lorrain, whose expansive representation of space he captures and extends in A Bigger Message (2010).

Beyond all the references, which Hockney crystallizes perfectly here, we’re left with Hockney’s unmistakable style. For a quintessential slice of it, look over to Books and Rain (2023). On loan from Hockney himself, red and green squiggles fill up a warm wall in this painting, wrapped around a rain-soaked window frame. Below the window is a small table covered with a simple blue-checkered cloth, two piles of three books on each side of the tabletop—a perfectly charming and evocative country house scene.

You also see it in a jolly self-portrait in one of the last rooms of the display, where Hockney sits in a garden with his wavy trees and rolling blue skies and one of his loud colorful checkered suits, drawing with one hand and smoking with the other.

In his lap, he’s painting the same scene we’re looking at, where he’s painting the same scene we’re looking at, where he’s painting the same scene we’re looking at. It’s called Play Within a Play Within a Play and Me with a Cigarette, and he finished painting it this year. There’s only one thing we can readily predict when it comes to Hockney: he’ll remain indefatigably prolific, and there will always be more art.

“David Hockney 25” is on view at the Fondation Louis Vuitton through August 31, 2025.

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