Halfway through my conversation with David Hockney I hit on a sure-fire way of making pots of money. It’s so good, I may take it on to Dragons’ Den. I’m going to manufacture some mini-Hockneys — tiny wind-up Davids that fit in your pocket — and every time you are feeling gloomy or in need of being charmed, you can take him out and listen to his mellifluous wisdoms. It’s sure to catch on.
Is there a sunnier, cheerier, more delightful presence in global culture than our David from Bradford? Not that I have encountered. The moment he unleashes his soft Yorkshire vowels the universe feels nicer. In the real world there are Trump and Putin monsters prowling the perimeter, frightening the children. But in the presence of Hockney they disappear — banished to another cosmos.
Hockney now lives in London. He has been here for several months, having been smuggled into his Marylebone home — one of many in his collection, including two in Los Angeles — without fanfares or declarations of purpose. Few citizens of the world have travelled as much as he has or set up home in as many places. But for now he’s in London and there is, you feel, a sense of permanence about the move, as if this may be the last stop on the coach tour.
How long have you been here, David? “Since July 2023.”
Why did you come back? “Intrusion. People kept coming round.”
His previous stop, a Hansel and Gretel cottage in Normandy that he immortalised in some of the sweetest landscapes in his oeuvre, was attracting a stream of visitors who were disturbing his work. As one of them, I can testify to the charm of his half-timbered French idyll with its dinky orchard and fairytale pond.
I interviewed him there during Covid, when the coastal motorway to Normandy was spookily empty, and was welcomed to paradise by the most beautiful cascade of primroses I have seen. The delightful Norman cottage was his home for four years.
But the idyll was a long way from a hospital. And although Hockney doesn’t mention his health, or suggest that he needs more care than he did, those are the kinds of things you think about when you’re 87. It’s certainly what I am thinking, even if he isn’t.
Hockney himself doesn’t do morbid self-absorption. In tribute to his favourite artist, Van Gogh, he is decked out dazzlingly in yellow. Yellow tweed suit with sizzling red check. Canary yellow tie. Matching yellow glasses. Everything is just so, and the message broadcast by his sunny appearance is not only that he loves yellow but that he is being cared for lovingly and will never face the world in a scruffy T-shirt and jeans. Gazing down at my own workwear of droopy tracksuit bottoms and lived-in corduroy top, I feel stabs of guilt. He cares in detail about what the eyes take in. I patently don’t.
Although visitor numbers have reduced in Marylebone, the occasional notable still turns up. The other day the King arrived. “He came on Monday for about an hour. But I didn’t offer to paint him.” Hockney doesn’t paint people he doesn’t know. It’s the chief reason he declined numerous offers to paint His Majesty’s mother.
“It’s difficult to do the majesty she had. That’s what I found difficult. I thought, she is a genuinely majestic figure. And I just couldn’t see a way to do it.” The notorious attempt by Lucian Freud to paint Her Majesty’s majesty — one of the worst royal portraits — didn’t please him either. What Freud got particularly wrong, he reckons, was the royal skin. “When you look at the Queen, her skin is absolutely marvellous. It’s very beautiful skin. Well, he didn’t get that at all.”
Knowing people for a long time makes an important difference. “If I know them really well the pictures are better.” The King, I suggest, will have to come round more often and bone up on his cultural small talk if he wants to get himself on the Hockney chair.
Among the new paintings he has managed to produce in Marylebone is a sweet view of himself in his yellow get-up, painting in the garden. It must be a spring picture because the daffodils are out, adding yet more yellow to the bouquet. In the picture he’s actually painting the picture we are looking at, so he’s called it Play Within a Play Within a Play and Me with a Cigarette. And there, indeed, dangling from his non-painting hand in the small and the big image, is the smouldering fag that has become the focus of his chuckling resistance. There’s also a photograph of Hockney painting the painting of him painting the painting, which he considers to be another artwork. Its message within a message within a message to the anti-faggists is, therefore: “Up yours, up yours, up yours!”
How gleefully Hockney has waded into the smoking wars. His view is that it is the petrol fumes emitted by cars, not the smoke of cigarettes, that should concern us. “I’m nearly 88 years old and I didn’t think I’d be here. I’m still a smoker, but I’m surviving. I read in the newspaper the other day that lung cancer was going up and smoking was going down. Well, what did that tell me? It told me that it wasn’t really smoking.”
Instead he worries about the cyclists and joggers who have been given their own lanes on our car-filled roads. They are the ones who should be concerned.
“People are getting very … bossy. There’s an awful lot of bossy people about now. They’re little Hitlers, aren’t they? And there’s lots of them. Bossy bossy boots.” He shows me a badge he’s produced in response to the little Hitlers. It says “End bossiness soon”.
“I thought if I put ‘End bossiness now’ it was too bossy. So recently I’ve had some made that say ‘End bossiness sooner’.”
Hockney is talking to me now because he has a new show opening and it is the biggest of his career — which is saying something, given how many big shows he has unveiled in 70 years of working life. You may perhaps find people to argue with if you call him the greatest living artist, but no one will challenge the view that he is the most popular. A Bigger Picture, his Royal Academy show of 2012, was enjoyed by more than 600,000 visitors, making it one of the best-attended exhibitions in museum history. For this next one I recommend getting your ticket orders in early.
Called David Hockney 25, it will take place in Paris at the ultra-prestigious Fondation Louis Vuitton. Looming excitingly over the Bois de Boulogne and designed by the great Frank Gehry, the architect of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, it is probably the most blue-chip private show space in the world. Having already had ambitious retrospectives at the Pompidou Centre and Tate Britain, Hockney was not expecting another go at a summary. But they approached him when he was in Normandy and he happily agreed.
The show will begin with a look back at some of his best moments — A Bigger Splash (1967) will be there, as will Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1971) and the revolutionary photographic collage of Pearblossom Highway (1986). But its main focus will be the work he has produced in the past 25 years — especially the landscapes, first in America, then in Bridlington in Yorkshire and finally in Normandy.
At this, Hockney tangents off into a chuckling lecture about dates, particularly the year 2000. I make the mistake of referring to it as the year “two thousand” and am treated to a ticking off.
“‘Two thousand’ always annoys me. I think it was [Tony] Blair or someone who said that. I say “twenty hundred”, because after eighteen hundred comes nineteen hundred. After nineteen hundred comes twenty hundred.” Apologies, Dr Johnson. Twenty hundred it is.
The Paris show has been curated by former oberführer of the Royal Academy and hardened Hockney supporter, Norman Rosenthal — at least that’s what it says in the catalogue. But when I put it to the man in yellow he responds a tad scratchily: “Well, he curated it but I mean, I did it. Nothing went in that I did not approve of.”
As always when Sir Norman is mentioned, I repeat the art world gag of referring to him as “Roman Nosenthal”, to which Hockney responds with his own version: “Roman Knows-it-all.” And we share a chuckle.
It turns out that Rosenthal, unlike the King, has recently been painted by Hockney. “I saw him in this outfit at a Royal Academy dinner. And he had a white tie and tails. But the white tie wasn’t quite white. It was yellow. And the shirt was yellow. Well, normally if you’re in white tie and tails you should look like Fred Astaire, shouldn’t you? But Norman didn’t. So I said, ‘Could I paint you in this?’”
As someone who wears a white tie and tails almost as badly as Sir Norman, I see this as an opportunity to make my own plea to be touched by the master. He only paints people he knows well, so I remind him that the first time I interviewed him was in 1987, on his 50th birthday. I flew out specially to Los Angeles. Since then we’ve met on numerous occasions, most recently at the Covid get-together in Normandy. He knows me far better than the King. How about it, David?
“Well, alright. I’ll do it. Yeah. I’ll do one of you.” Reader, I have it on tape!
The new show coincides deliberately with the coming of spring. “Yes, it does,” Hockney says, smiling. “And that’s better than winter.” Spring comes a bit earlier in France than it does in England. Having lived there on various occasions, it’s clear the land of the impressionists has a special place in his heart.
For Hockney, one of the advantages of being in London is that he has been able to see more shows. He enjoyed Van Gogh at the National Gallery so much he went twice. Remembering the canary yellows of the self-portrait with a cigarette, I ask him to confirm that Van Gogh is his favourite painter and he wiggles his fag in gentle agreement.
Van Gogh, you see, was happiest when he was painting. “Well, I might say that too. I’m happiest when I’m painting. I may not be quite as miserable as Van Gogh, but when you read the biographies of him, they can’t describe his happiness when he was painting, can they? They can only describe the misery.”
As he continues his love letter to Vincent, I feel a beautiful joy descending on me, and fall into my own happy imaginings. What Hockney brings into the world is something akin to the moods of the nursery: a note of innocence, a boundless curiosity about the world, a delight in simple sights and simple colours.
It’s while realising this that I get my idea about producing the mini-Hockneys. Does anyone have Deborah Meaden’s number?
David Hockney 25 is at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, Apr 9-Aug 31.