David Hockney
By Elga Wimmer
What makes a living legend? David Hockney played a pivotal role in the emergence of Pop Art, which originated in the mid-1950s in both the United States and Great Britain. His iconic paintings of swimming pools in the 1960s, as a recurring motif, embodied Pop Art’s fascination with contemporary culture, leisure, and everyday objects. Hockney captured the Zeitgeist of a much-mythologized era, in paintings that glorified a rich, carefree California lifestyle, an LA society humming with art patrons and artist friends.
While Andy Warhol was the impresario of the New York art scene in the 1960s, Hockney proved to be the golden boy of a laid-back, California joie de vivre, in his understated, yet quietly powerful presence in Los Angeles.
David Hockney became one of the most recognizable artists of his time, playing by his own rules. He worked in figurative painting when this art form wasn’t considered current. For decades, the artist wore the slogan “End Bossiness Soon” on a badge. Hockney experimented early on with modern technology with Polaroid and photocopiers, and more recently painted on his iPhone and iPad, comparing the possibilities of creating images on a screen to the composition of stained glass. He wrote a theory on Camera Lucida, used by Western artists since the 15th Century, whose portraits and images of their techniques he installed on an entire wall in his Retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation.
The retrospective David Hockney 25 at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris (April 9 to August 31, 2025) is the largest exhibition of the artist’s works to date – over 400 works from 40 private and institutional collections – and according to Hockney in an interview at the exhibition with BBC: ‘At my age, it better be the best!’ The artist oversaw the installation of his Retrospective, filling all four floors and 11 exhibition galleries of the Louis Vuitton Foundation, chose the colors of the walls as vibrant blue, red and yellow backdrops to his artwork, and edited a newspaper that accompanies the exhibition. Hockney worked closely with Sir Norman Rosenthal, the curator of the exhibition, using dozens of 3-D models of the museum space.
David Hockney 25 opens with the artist’s most iconic works of the 20th Century, namely Portrait of my Father (1955), the first painting he sold, and Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970/’71), his double portrait of the designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell. Then there is the most perfect embodiment of Californian swimming pool paintings, A Bigger Splash (1967) and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972). His nearly 25-feet-wide, A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998), serves an ode to American landscape painting.
His homoerotic works as We Two Boys Together Clinging (early 1960s) and The Room Tarzana (1967), depict Hockney’s friend Peter Schlesinger, in the latter with his face down lying on a bed, naked from the waist down. Homosexuality was still illegal in England then, which most probably prompted Hockney’s move to California. Most of these early works were created in London and Los Angeles. Yet, the bulk of the exhibition is comprised of relatively recent works, from the last 25 years – hence the show’s title, David Hockney 25, which the artist spent mostly in the rural settings of Yorkshire, England and Normandy, France.
After spending some three decades in Los Angeles, the artist returned to his native Yorkshire, drawn to the pristine forests and hills of one of the last unspoiled areas of England. In the tradition of British landscape painters of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Turner, Gainsborough, and Constable, Hockney revels in the effects of light and atmosphere, unique colors, and dramatic cloud formation, and turned to painting en plein air with an easel. He became a steadfast figure in the countryside to neighbors of his rural demeure. The painting Bigger Trees near Warter or/ou Peinture sur le Motif du Nouvel Age post-photographique, 2007, comprised of 50 canvases, is a mesmerizing example of landscape painting in fauve colors.
Landscape and portraiture seem to be, in the English tradition, Hockney’s themes of predilection. His early double portraits of friends from his social circle in the 1960s and 1970s mix nonchalant poses with formal conventions of portraiture, while the more recent self-portraits, particularly a series from 2012, exude a sense of humor, even self-mockery. These recall the 18th century sculptor, Franz Xavier Messerschmidt, with faces contorted in satirical expressions and canonical grimaces, symbolizing the full range of human emotion – the Comédie Humaine.
During Hockney’s time in France, fauve colors began to appear, a seeming homage to one of his favorite artists, Van Gogh. For example, Winter Timber, 2008, oil on canvas, Untitled, 22 July 2005, 2005, and Vincent’s Chair and Pipe (La chaise et la pipe de Vincent), 1988. There is also a nod to Cezanne as in A Bigger Card Players (Les Joueurs de Carte en Plus Grand Format), 2015, and to Monet in Giverny by DH, 2023. Two recent paintings, After Blake ((2024) and After Munch (2023) with the title Less Is known Than People Think finish out the arch of the show at the Louis Vuitton Foundation.
Hockney exudes the wonder of a child’s gaze, marveling as if born in the moment. It seems his intention is to share that innocent worldview. That visitors to his shows walk away with a new bounce in their step. As the artist himself states, “Looking has been my greatest joy all my life.”
David Hockney and the Lesson of the Old Master Painters
By Franco Moro
The remarkable chromatic vibrancy conveyed through David Hockney’s luminous palette appears to highlight a youthful freshness of spirit – consistently genuine, pure, and spontaneous – that permeates his entire artistic trajectory. Time seems never to have passed for the 88-year-old boy who still paints the emotions of a lifetime with the same ironic and fairytale-like vitality through which he has long expressed himself, employing juxtapositions of full, luminous, and both acid and glacial colors—vivid purples and yellows, bright pinks and reds, sharp greens, and deep blues—that only seemingly clash. In doing so, he transcends the textured warmth of Van Gogh’s canvases with the tonal thrill of a gaze that remains clear and serene, a pupil dilated, fully open to the light of life’s bitterness. Inclusive of symbolic states of disappointment and pain, his work ultimately represents the constant transfiguration of human feeling through an unchanging vision of nature. Perhaps it is precisely this ruthlessly objective – albeit seemingly disenchanted – aspect that renders him all the more original, astonishing, and even wondrous, particularly for a master deeply steeped in the knowledge of classical art.
His interpretation of the figurative tradition finds its primary motivation in visual study drawn from our artistic past – from the masters of the Quattrocento to the French Impressionists, and from Matisse and Picasso to Kandinsky and Magritte – filtered into what is only seemingly a childlike key, manifesting through the subtle interplay between enlightened, luminescent colorism and visual risk-taking. So much so that another significant aspect of his work – the originality of compositional framing offered to the viewer, including perspective angles and image cropping – almost recedes into the background. Surprise thus seems to be the artist’s foremost objective: a sense of wonder and astonishment that is at once enveloping and engaging, yet also distancing, particularly in light of the large-scale, scenographic dimensions of his canvases, which, though otherwise intimate and silent, consistently prompt reflection.
This reflection was also extended by Hockney to the works of his artistic forebears, when he began to study in detail the technical execution of drawings and paintings by the great masters—with the alert eyes of a child. Careful observation thus became the catalyst that awakened an understanding of fundamental aspects key to uncovering the practical efficacy behind certain masterpieces of art, known to us all and preserved in the most important museums around the world. Yet never before had they been examined and interpreted with such practical acuity, with such a clear and focused attention to the methods of execution. A history of figurative art seen through the eyes of a painter! In his 2001 volume, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (2001), and more recently A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen (co-written with Martin Gayford, Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2016; Abrams, 2020) – two volumes that, for different reasons, are striking in their perceptive reading of a historical truth often overlooked or deliberately obscured revealed Hockney’s investigation, into an entire repertoire of modest yet powerful tools which, plausibly beginning in the second decade of the fifteenth century, assisted and enhanced the technical quality of Flemish, Italian, French, and German masters alike.
What we, as art historians, had long been accustomed to define – on the basis of admirable scholarly intuitions – as the ‘lenticular vision of the Flemish masters,’ evoking that refined visual outcome made possible by the use of a lens to enhance the infinitesimal quality of light-infused details, so captivating for their meticulous execution, was reinterpreted by Hockney as stemming from the skilled relationship forged between painters and the scientific knowledge of their time. This connection, he argues, was made possible through the use of lenses, mirrors, and image projections. Only through this interpretive lens can we make sense of certain astonishing reproductions of detail that would otherwise elicit an eternally ungraspable sense of wonder. An exemplary case is the complex foreshortened perspective of the six-branched chandelier at the center of The Arnolfini Portrait (London, National Gallery, no. 186), where Jan van Eyck, in addition to rendering the exquisitely refined interior that frames the couple, invites the viewer to observe their reflection – surely not by chance – in the convex mirror hanging on the back wall, beneath which the artist proudly inscribed his signature and the date, 1434.
Only in this way can we better understand the crisp definition of facial features in portraits, the ruthless precision of objects, the accurate rendering of drapery through light and shadow, and the challenging foreshortening of musical instruments. This line of inquiry extends to include the work of Robert Campin, Rogier van der Weyden, Jean Fouquet, Hans Memling, and Dirck Bouts, culminating in Hugo van der Goes, who in 1483 sent the famous Portinari Triptych to Florence for the Church of Sant’Egidio (now in the Uffizi Gallery). These technical artifices and secrets were able to spread rapidly, facilitated by the frequent exchange of works between artists and patrons, as well as the circulation of paintings and the travels of artists themselves – such as Rogier van der Weyden’s journey to Rome in 1450, a path already taken years earlier by Jean Fouquet. Van der Weyden also visited the Italian courts of Milan, Mantua, Ferrara, Florence, and Naples, where he disseminated compelling examples of his style, commissioned by the Medici family (The Deposition of Christ in the Tomb and Madonna and Child with Saints), or as revealed in the Portrait of Francesco d’Este (New York, Metropolitan Museum). Hockney acknowledges the contribution of Antonello da Messina, who grasped these technical innovations – not limited to oil painting alone – and reinterpreted them through the lens of the sublime Italian optical tradition, as seen in his celebrated Saint Jerome in His Study (London, National Gallery) and in his strikingly incisive and vibrant portraits.
It is this objective realism that Hockney also identifies as the source of the most astonishing works by Hans Holbein the Younger, particularly in his flawless depiction of carpets and curved or spherical objects, as seen in The Ambassadors (London, National Gallery) and in the Portrait of the Merchant Georg Gisze (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen). The projection of objects through a concave mirror-lens, Hockney argues, results in a composition that—due to the inherent limitations of such early optical devices—takes the form of a kind of ‘collage’: a sequence of visual fragments, frames, and windows, sometimes copied and replicated with the aid of an epidiascope. Hockney demonstrates this eloquently (see pp. 76–77), uncovering the long-concealed secret of the old masters, discreetly passed down and carefully guarded. The use of small mirrors and perspectival devices enabled painters to produce representations that were far more accurate and true to life, simplifying and accelerating a process that would otherwise have been even more arduous. Far from diminishing the artistic merit of these painters, this insight highlights their intellectual capacity and openness to scientific and technological innovation. It elevates their accomplishments, especially when we consider that the artistic aim of the time was entirely devoted to the most faithful possible imitation (mimesis) of nature. Hockney untangles this complex thread and shows how painters made use of such tools to achieve results that remain extraordinary in the eyes of the viewer. And he is undoubtedly on target. His interpretation – grounded in visual analysis, documentary evidence, and historical insight – resolves questions long debated, unveiling the ‘tricks’ of a painter fully embedded in his time and an astute participant in its cultural and scientific currents.
It was through this logical transmission of process that Venice – an important commercial centre and geographically close to the university city of Padua – also participated in the evolution of these visual techniques, as evidenced in the inaccessible yet foundational works of Giorgione (La Vecchia, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia) and those of Lorenzo Lotto. Their approach to portraiture laid the groundwork for later masters such as Giovan Battista Moroni, Anthonis Mor, and the young Caravaggio. In this light, we better understand why Michelangelo Merisi carried mirrors in his pocket – devices he is known to have used alongside other contrivances, such as the small hole in his studio wall that allowed a beam of light to project figures onto the canvas, in effect anticipating the camera obscura and enabling a scenographically dynamic form of narration. Through these stratagems, Caravaggio conveyed an emotional intensity that became the hallmark of his artistic pursuit. While Hockney cannot fully account for Merisi’s cultural and scientific knowledge – Galileo, foremost among his contemporaries – nor for the Lombard’s early excellence as both portraitist and draughtsman (see F. Moro, Caravaggio sconosciuto. Le origini del Merisi, eccellente disegnatore, maestro di ritratti e di «cose naturali», Turin 2016), he nonetheless perceptively identifies the importance of the photographic, or rather cinematic, effect achieved through Caravaggio’s meticulous staging of his scenes. With Caravaggio, the objective, perspectival logic of the Quattrocento – famously exemplified by Brunelleschi, Leon Battista Alberti, and Piero della Francesca – is definitively surpassed, giving way to an innovative cinematic vision.
These investigations also trace the origins of that precise scenographic vision which, in the early decades of the seventeenth century, “succeeds in establishing the veduta secundum veritatem, with an optical and realistic firmness that would become a continuous historical thread up to Canaletto and Bellotto” (Roberto Longhi, Viviano Codazzi e l’invenzione della veduta realistica, in Paragone, no. 71, 1955, p. 41). These prescient yet still unaware words foreshadow the importance of the camera obscura and of the auxiliary tools that enhanced the spectacular and immersive rendering of reality.
The English painter, who makes fruitful use of and interprets this knowledge, through compositional choices such as puzzle-like collages in some of his most expansive canvases or through other ingenious devices, emphasizes that the value of the artist remains entirely intact, never diminished. Optical apparatuses developed over the centuries served only to alleviate the technical burden of reproducing an image already clearly perceived by the human eye. It is always the artist’s skill that determines the objective of the work; only the artist bears the merit of studying and interpreting such solutions. Of deciding what effect to convey, what messages to transmit to the viewer, and what emotions and sensations to leave for posterity.
The scientific dimension highlighted by David Hockney constitutes purely a practical aid aimed at achieving the best possible result. His intention is certainly not to devalue the work of his artistic forebears; rather, it is to explain and to enhance both their creative processes and their accomplishments – accomplishments that preserve their expressive power. These results are distinguished and remembered by humanity precisely insofar as they embody messages and values worthy of transmission. The great masters mentioned, like many others, have been recognized across generations for their exceptional ability to convey emotions, feelings, and inner states – rendering the meaning of life in tune with their era, while also serving as prophetic and forward-looking voices of elevated and profound significance.