‘His last kiss to the world’: David Hockney’s return to Yorkshire triggered a glorious reawakening
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- David Hockney 25 opened at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in early April (last year), curated with Hockney's close involvement and built around the argument that his 21st-century pictures match or surpass his famous early work
- During the pandemic lockdown, Hockney in Normandy painted his garden on an iPad each morning and emailed the images out to spread cheer, with the author waking to a fresh painting in their inbox daily
- Hockney relocated to Bridlington, Yorkshire, setting up an easel en plein air in the tradition of a French impressionist, working from a tiny upstairs bedroom in a house he'd painted in "powerful California colours"
- His relationship with Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima — once his assistant, later his lover, referred to in one lockdown email as "JP who I love" — coincided, the author argues, with a flowering of his Normandy and Yorkshire art
- Hockney's book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters argued that Old Masters including Caravaggio used optical devices, a theory he pressed over dinner with the author after a private National Gallery visit
- A show this year at London's Serpentine Gallery served, in the author's telling, as a "final victory lap," with Hockney ending the 21st century "the toast of the art world" after years far from fashion
Why it matters: By placing Hockney's hay bales and iPad garden scenes in the same rooms as A Bigger Splash, the Fondation Louis Vuitton show built an institutional case that late work can equal — not merely extend — a legendary early career, reframing how museums frame an artist's final decades and shifting attention back to observational painting at a moment when drawing was "rumoured to be dead."
