Call it a homecoming, call it a coronation, or call it what David Hockney calls it — “good.” The British polymath, never one for understatement, has taken over the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris with David Hockney 25, a retrospective that spills over with more than 400 works, seven decades of invention, and a fierce refusal to ever, ever slow down.

If Picasso had his Blue Period, Hockney has had all the colors, and often at once.

A Gallery Devoured by a Life

Every single room — all eleven — of the Louis Vuitton Foundation is now filled to the brim with Hockney’s life translated into line, pigment, and pixels. Curated with the artist’s own hand (and his partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima), the exhibition reads like a living autobiography: not a quiet memoir but an orchestral crescendo of eras, mediums, and muses.

We begin on the “pool floor” — the 1950s through 1970s — where Portrait of My Father and A Bigger Splash still radiate with their taut, voyeuristic serenity. Hockney’s obsessions are there from the start: domesticity, water, male beauty, the angles of modern life. But the show doesn’t linger in nostalgia.

Instead, it charges forward, into the riotous color of the 1980s and the laser-sharp explorations of the 1990s, before reaching what Hockney clearly sees as the real meat of his career: the years from 2000 to 2025.

The Joy of Reinvention

This is not an artist looking backward. It is a man mid-sentence.

There is delight — nearly impish — in the way Hockney embraces the digital. One gallery pulses with works made entirely on iPads, those flat plastic talismans of modernity. With a few fingers, Hockney channels the same genius that once filled canvases with sun-bleached California pools and Yorkshire hedgerows.

If you think digital painting lacks gravitas, stand in front of his scrolling digital landscapes and tell me you don’t feel time dissolve. This is not a gimmick. This is a master expanding his vocabulary, stretching syntax, bending grammar — painting not with light, but as light.

400 Works, One Voice

There’s something both audacious and intimate about this retrospective. It’s vast, yes — a flood of images, stories, epochs. But it’s also unmistakably personal. Hockney has curated himself with the precision of a poet choosing which lines to leave in.

The older works hum with the echo of art history: Bacon, Matisse, Picasso. But the later works — iPad drawings of friends, blooming English gardens, spectral trees in dawn fog — are Hockney as pure and distilled as rain.

Even now, at 87, he is still experimenting, still producing, still looking. There’s a quiet challenge embedded in David Hockney 25: How many artists are brave enough to see their past not as a legacy, but as a sketchpad?

A Retrospective That Looks Forward

To call this show “retrospective” feels almost wrong. It’s more like a prologue. There is no self-eulogizing, no heavy-handed mythology. Instead, David Hockney 25 functions as a joyous, defiant testament: the creative life has no finish line. And Hockney, with his ever-watchful eyes and eager hands, is still very much in the race.

It’s going to be good, I think.

– Before the exhibition opened, Hockney said simply.

No. It’s monumental. And it’s still in motion.