May 2025

This weekend I got to see David Hockney 25, the new Hockney exhibit at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. I was kind of…awestruck, and felt compelled to write down a few observations.

**1/ The sheer volume of work is staggering—**especially so considering this show largely features pieces from the last 25 years (he’s 87). The chart below (courtesy of ChatGPT) confirms he has indeed sustained very high volumes of output for many, many years—at least compared to the sample of others I asked about. Obviously sheer output doesn’t by itself guarantee that the work is good, but it is notable this guy is just consistently doing the work. Inspiring.

2/ He’ll make variations of the same/similar subjects dozens of times. ****Of course many artists do this to some extent, but it’s the volume and frequency of the repetition that jumped out to me relative to other artists I’m reasonably familiar with. There’s a wall with dozens of self-portraits, all painted from similar angles. There are ~dozens of pieces capturing the same barn or part of the road near his home in Normandy. There’s an entire room devoted to drawings and paintings of the moon, painted from his yard in Normandy (the moon room is magical!!). It’s made me wonder what is the value in this kind of repetition? Is it practice to build skill? For the love of the activity itself? For wanting to see something through different light/angles (literally and figuratively)? Does he feel he’s getting better each time he paints the moon? Does he ever feel bored? Is it meditative? I wonder what he’d say.

3/ His work exudes a joyful, playful energy. ****For me, his use of color is certainly a big part of that. But there are many other ways that joy and playfulness manifest. As one example, take a look at the piece below, which, in my opinion is a visual delight on first blush—the patterned suit, the zebra-blue sky, the tulips. Then we notice the meta vibes—he’s painting himself painting this painting. OK, cute. Then we get closer and see he’s wearing a button that says End Bossiness Soon which made me audibly laugh when I saw it. I then looked it up to see if there was a story behind it, and in 2002 Hockney made an End Bossiness Now placard at the “Liberty & Livelihood” march in London, explicitly protesting rural over-regulation but really referring to any person or institution that tries to tell others how to live—government, EU bureaucrats, moral scolds, overbearing critics. It then occurred to him End Bossiness Now was itself a bit bossy, he softened it to End Bossiness Soon. He now often wears it tongue-in-cheek while smoking defiantly in interviews, insisting that “life is for living” at 87. There are little easter eggs/rabbit holes like this all over. You cannot help but feel his playfulness towards life, and people, and art, and nature—it just oozes from him.

4/ He’s not shy about exploring modern mediums, the iPad drawings being the most prominent example (I imagine many serious artists would scoff at the use of an iPad). But the most exciting example to me was an immersive exhibit where he illustrates operas. Hockney, a long-time opera lover, wants people to be able to ‘see’ the music (made me think of Kandinsky, but sort of the inverse?). To that end, he’s illustrated segments of Mozart’s Magic Flute and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, and those illustrations are projected onto the walls and ceiling of a dedicated room in the exhibit where people can lie on cushions on the floor and soak it all in. I sat here mesmerized (and so overwhelmed, at times, that I had tears in my eyes) for I’m not sure how long. It was magnificent.

In short, do go if you can! It’s open until August 2025. (And in the meantime, a random selection below, far too many great ones to choose from to attempt to be representative here.)