An attempt to capture the animating force of life

Review of David Hockney Paris Show in NYT

The foundation’s exhibition, “David Hockney 25” is the painter’s largest to date. While its title indicates a focus on his most recent 25 years of work, it feels like an overview of his whole career. It’s a joyful vision, and a record, of a life in art lived with passionate curiosity, attention to the human condition and reverence for the natural world.

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The essence of Hockney’s work is the attempt to capture the animating force of life — in the faces of friends and loved ones, or in a blossoming tree, changing season or night sky. Just before the turn of the century, Hockney moved back to Yorkshire, where he grew up. He stayed for a little more than a decade, turning his eye to the familiar, inexhaustible landscape of his childhood. In these paintings, hills roll, roads twist and turn, trees shed and sprout foliage, fields are golden and russet patchworks, light illuminates dense forests in otherworldly crimson and fuchsia.

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A series of paintings of hawthorn trees in blossom show the flowers surging in dense, roiling masses, pouring along the roadside. A wall text for “Hawthorn Blossom Near Rudston” (2008) describes Hockney’s obsession with the hawthorn’s annual blooming, which arrives unpredictably at a moment he calls “action week.” At its appearance each year, no matter where he was at the time, the artist would drop everything to return to Yorkshire and paint the bountiful white flower, frothing, Hockney has said, like “champagne poured over everything.”

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Despite their British settings, the otherworldly hues and writhing lines of works like “Felled Trees,” “Bigger Trees Near Warter” (both 2008) and “Untitled No. 2 (The Arrival of Spring)” (2011), recall the Post-Impressionism of Vincent Van Gogh, or the symbolism of Maurice Denis. Both artists, like Hockney, believed that nature possessed infinite inspiration, and that any single view holds within it the entirety of the world: One must simply look.

“Hawthorn Blossom Near Rudston” (2008)