Poised to open its doors on Wednesday, Paris’s biggest art show of the year carries the humble title David Hockney 25. A more accurate description of its ambition would have been the name of the artist’s best-known painting: A Bigger Splash.
Purportedly focused only on the past 25 years of the Yorkshire-born painter’s career, the 456 works on display at the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s 11 vast galleries in fact span 1955-2025.
The one-off exhibition includes acrylic paintings, iPad drawings and immersive video works, from Hockney’s classic California swimming pool scenes via his Swinging Sixties portraits to the pastoral Yorkshire and Normandy landscapes of the later years, as well as unseen William Blake-inspired spiritual paintings completed in the past two years.
Announced by the British curator Norman Rosenthal as the most important show in the career of Britain’s greatest living artist, and described by the architect Frank Gehry as “the biggest show they have ever had” at the decade-old private museum, it also underscores Paris’s efforts to reclaim from London its status as Europe’s art capital.
Born in Bradford in 1937, Hockney has over the course of his career been a resident in London, Los Angeles and the Yorkshire coastal town of Bridlington. In 2019, he settled in a 17th-century farmhouse in the Pays d’Auge countryside, south of Deauville, Normandy.
The 2020 lockdown led him to produce a continuous 90-metre frieze of iPad paintings inspired by the Bayeux tapestry nearby. Entitled A Year in Normandie, it is again on show in Paris this week.
The move coincided with renewed French interest in the British artist after a large retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2017, followed by shows at the Galerie Lelong and the Orangerie museum in Paris, the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen and the Matisse museum in Nice.
“France and Hockney became a mutual love affair,” said Catherine Cusset, a French author whose 2018 “biographical novel”, Life of David Hockney, is being reissued in an illustrated version this week. “I think he felt at home here: he enjoys good food and good wine, and the French are more tolerant than England or California when it comes to his other big passion – smoking.”
Cusset explained her country’s view of the British artist: “The great appeal of Hockney’s paintings is that they are easy to understand. This was sometimes a criticism. In France, though, Hockney found a tradition of other painters giving an enchanting view of the world: Matisse, Bonnard, and his neighbour in Normandy, Claude Monet.”
Yet an exhibition of the size and scale of David Hockney 25 can only in part be explained by mutual admiration. For the show, Fondation Louis Vuitton is loaning works from museums around the world – signature paintings such as A Bigger Splash and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy from the Tate, and the panoramic A Bigger Grand Canyon from the National Gallery of Australia – creating transport and insurance costs that would be hard for other institutions to shoulder.
The Gehry-designed private museum, sponsored by the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH and headed by one of the world’s richest people, Bernard Arnault, opened in Bois de Boulogne in 2014.
“When the Fondation Louis Vuitton hosts a show these days, there is almost no competition”, said Thaddaeus Ropac, an Austrian gallerist. The museum’s most successful show to date, 2016-17’s Icons of Modern Art, drew 1.3 million visitors.
The opening of Fondation Louis Vuitton kickstarted a proliferation of similar private exhibition sites, such as the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, by the billionaire founder of luxury group Kering, François Pinault, which opened in 2021. The Fondation Cartier is setting up a large contemporary art space on the historic Place du Palais-Royal in Paris, right across from the Louvre, that will open to the public in autumn.
“Paris has developed in a way I used to think was not possible”, said Ropac, who has galleries in Paris and London and commutes between the two European capitals. “We haven’t seen such a concentration of new museums anywhere else in Europe, or even in the US recently.”
Britain remains the largest market for art in Europe by some distance: according to the 2024 Art Basel & UBS art market report, France’s estimated share of the previous year’s global art sales was 7% compared with Britain’s 17. But the trend and the ambition are with the French capital.
“Paris used to be the art capital of the world in the early 20th century,” said Clément Delépine, the director of Art Basel Paris. “Then we lost that status to London and New York. Now there’s a shared assumption that we can collectively reposition our city.”