“The king came here last Monday,” David Hockney tells me when I visit him recently via Zoom at his London house and adjoining studio. “We talked for an hour, and the next day, when he was making Tracey Emin a dame, he told her he’d been to my studio. I don’t know what she thought of that.” The 87-year-old artist looks the way he always has, a bit diminished but jaunty and stylish as ever. His signature black-rimmed eyeglasses, huge and round, are bright yellow now. His hair is thinning and white. He’s wearing a turquoise sweater, a black-and-white checkerboard tie, and one of the nine patterned suits made for him by his favorite tailor in Cannes—it’s the same suit he wears when he’s painting, and the same one he’s wearing in his latest self-portrait.
When we speak, he’s sitting at a cluttered table in his living room, in front of a floor-to-ceiling red velvet curtain. Tess, the beloved dachshund belonging to him and his partner Jean-Pierre (JP) Gonçalves de Lima, is barking somewhere else in the house. I ask him about the “End Bossiness Soon” button on his lapel. “I was going to put ‘End Bossiness Now,’ but then I thought that is in itself too bossy. There’s lots of bossy people around now, more than there used to be.” He lights a cigarette, somewhat defiantly, and inhales. The lining of his suit jacket is decorated with images of cigars. “I smoke anything,” he says, when I ask him if he smokes cigars as well. “I’ve lived long enough. I’ve been a professional artist for 70 years, and I’m just about to have the largest exhibition I’ve ever had.”
The exhibition he’s referring to opens April 9 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Nearly 400 works—paintings, drawings, prints, and stage designs—will take over the entire Frank Gehry–designed building in the Bois de Boulogne. “It’s the biggest show they’ve ever had,” Gehry tells me, when I reach him by phone in Los Angeles. “I can’t wait to go and see it, because he doesn’t just hang paintings. He really takes over a building. He has the courage to do that.”
“David considers this the most important show of his career,” says the art historian Norman Rosenthal, who is curating the exhibition. “He’s, in the best sense of the word, very ordinary. He’s just speaking to himself. And by speaking to himself, with himself, he speaks to everybody. He appeals to people without compromising his vision of the world.” The project is a personal one for LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault as well. “As an admirer of David Hockney’s work since the earliest days of his career,” he says, “I am delighted that Fondation Louis Vuitton will be presenting this landmark exhibition. Not only will the exhibition be remarkable in its scale, but with Hockney’s direct involvement in every aspect of it, it will offer an unparalleled insight into his creative universe and reveal the extraordinary evolution of his art over the past three quarters of a century.”
The scholar and head of contemporary programs at the Louvre museum, Donatien Grau, writes in the exhibition’s catalog (published by Thames & Hudson): “David is one of the greatest draughtsmen working today, with skills akin to those of Degas or Picasso.” Hockney has painted Grau’s portrait twice. “You could see the things that obsess him: colors, first and foremost,” Grau recalls. “He made the dark blue of my jacket sharper, the black of the trousers darker. The dots on my scarf—he painted them all, one by one. With the chair, you could almost identify every strand of the wicker.”
The chair in Hockney’s Kensington studio is a rather small, oddly patterned upholstered armchair, and all of his London portrait subjects know it well. Hockney has lived and worked in many different parts of the world—London, Los Angeles, Paris, Yorkshire, Normandy—but in the last couple of years, he’s moved back to London. His health is fragile, but his mind is as alert as ever, and he’s making new work in his studio every day. He can’t help doing it. When he’s not in the studio, he enjoys seeing his old friends and going to exhibitions—he saw the Van Gogh show at the National Gallery twice—and to the ballet and the opera. He reads voraciously, new art books and catalogs, and he loves biographies—recently Katherine Bucknell’s life of Christopher Isherwood.
