You can’t catch up with him! About the David Hockney exhibition in Paris

David Hockney’s exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Foundation is not even a handful, but some kind of a storehouse of vitamins for all occasions. It’s not even the color, for which the great Englishman is famous all his life. But in some kind of virus of happiness, which he brought out in his distant and gloomy post-war childhood (margarine on cards, stingy diet, rutabaga for dinner, meat once a month, radio in the evenings, God save the King! Hockney still caught George VI). What remains from this period is a modest portrait of his father in a black dress suit. So he would have painted further his non-glamorous compatriots, if he had not been drawn to another continent, to other latitudes, to another sun and light.

California. Instead of British sarcasm and irony, American complacency. Instead of eternal slumber and fog – eternal Californian summer. Instead of bedtime warmers and smoky fireplaces of the beloved fatherland – turquoise pools, tanned guys and sunburned majestic canyons. All this shone on his canvases and played with new colors, new light. Somewhere on another continent Francis Bacon suffered and squirmed like a toothache, drowning depression and countless addictions in the black squares of his canvases. The mountains of living meat in Lucian Freud’s epic paintings were rotting away. But Hockney’s are pink dawns, purple sunsets, the purest showers, endless blooming gardens, hundreds of bouquets, naive and lovely, as if composed by Eliza Doolittle herself after she had upgraded her skills with Dr. Higgins and had, as she had planned, her own flower shop.

In fact, most of these picturesque “bouquets” were in hospitals and hospices, where Hockney faithfully came to visit his friends. Many of them then passed away from AIDS or other fatal diseases. And probably the last thing they saw were the lovely floral still life gifts from their dear friend David. Nature morte is literally “dead nature.” But at Hockney’s, it’s always alive. No bouquet is ever the same. Not a single flower has lost its freshness.

Nor, for that matter, are the portraits of people. Hockney has an uncanny grasp of external resemblance and a state of happy relaxation. He likes to catch this dreamy waiting looks and relaxed poses. In detail, expertly draws, who was dressed in what. On his canvases it is easy to trace how the fashion of the 60s-70s-80s. But it is even easier to trace the change of seasons, the imperceptible gradualness of the transition from blooming to fading, from the birth of life to its extinction.

All of Hockney’s landscapes are philosophical parables and poems, such as the road to York, which he painted at the request of his friend, the gallerist Jonathan Silver. When he was diagnosed with cancer, he and David traveled along this road for chemotherapy. Those blood-red rooftops against a ringing green background. And the gray asphalt of an empty road marked in half. By the way, it was Silver’s idea to take Hockney back to the British Isles. It was Silver’s idea to bring Hockney back to the British Isles, saying that he had had enough of lounging on the beaches of Santa Monica, it was time to look for other sources of inspiration.

However, then there was also a more important reason – seriously ill mother of the artist. But you will never guess from the paintings of the late 90’s about his secret dramas, sorrows or collapses, which, in fact, also had enough in abundance … Hockney – a desperate workaholic, an avid smoker, a passionate music lover and lover of classical opera – never complains about anything, never complains about anything, not even his current infirmity and decrepitude. His life may be colored black, but his art never is. Sometimes he makes pithy statements that become memes or spectacular neon installations. One of them is painted right on the LV Foundation’s facade: “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring”.

And at the exhibition itself, on several screens at the same time, suddenly flashes in French: “Remember! You cannot look at the Sun and Death indefinitely.

It is amazing how an artist who was formed under the influence of classical modernists, who has gone through all the temptations of pop art and postmodernism, who has perfectly mastered the latest computer technology (since 2011 Hockney has not parted with his iPad and prefers to draw exclusively there) – how he managed to retain the effulgence and serenity of a child. His current exhibition is a direct refutation of the famous saying: “If youth knew, if old age could”.

Old age, in the person of David Hockney, very much can. And these immense compositions, and multi-figure compositions, and trellis hanging, covering endless meters of LV with a dense carpet of color – all this is a clear proof of that. The artist himself rides merrily around the exposition in a wheelchair, as in his garden in Normandy. He puffs the unchanged Camel – a pack a day. He is wearing a tweed cap in a plaid and signature glasses in colored round frames, which were once worn by Harold Lloyd. Hockney himself has chosen the image of the British eccentric – a bit of a freak, a bit of a retired professor, a bit of a villager.

“I’m almost 88,” the artist admits, “Many people think I should have died long ago – I smoke a lot and haven’t quit the habit until now. But an artist cannot be judged until he has finished his last work. For me, the perfect day is the day I write. My ultimate dream is to live to see my birthday on July 9 and celebrate 88 years.”

Every day is a gift. And every painting is like a greeting card. From nowhere with love. Why out of nowhere, though? Hockney’s address is well known: Normandy. Not far from the village of Bevron-en-Auge, ten miles south of Cabourg, sung by Marcel Proust as Balbec.

Actually, David Hockney himself is a modern Proust in painting. The last chronicler of happy moments. He holds them, he multiplies them, entering into a complex relationship with the entire history of art. The walls of one of the galleries are covered with postcards and reproductions of classical paintings and sculptures – what fashion designers call “moodboard”. And there are Hockney’s own variations on the themes of his favorite Fra Angelico, Cézanne and Picasso.

And as a long-awaited apotheosis – the Opera Grotto, where to the music of Mozart, Stravinsky, Verdi, Wagner, Mahler, Beethoven and other great composers with the help of animators of studio 59 Productions we have colorful visions floating before our eyes. A farewell to a Great Era, directed by Hockney as a kind of parade-alley. Everything will pass, bloom, fade away, but great music will remain. That’s what he firmly and adamantly believes. Although he can hear very little himself: “I’m almost deaf, I catch a little of the sounds around me. But the music in my voice is like Beethoven’s”.

He wheeled away in his electric wheelchair to the Fidelio Overture, puffing merrily on a cigarette. The incomprehensible, incredible, elusive David Hockney. And all we have to do is to look at this receding back in a striped jacket. With admiration and even some fear. You can’t catch him!