Huge Paris exhibition reveals David Hockney’s love of Van Gogh

Van Gogh has arguably been the painter who has had the deepest affect on David Hockney, Britain’s best residing artist. Hockney is now being celebrated with a 400-work exhibition on the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Entitled David Hockney 25 (till 31 August), a lot of the works had been made in the course of the previous quarter century, together with some key earlier ones.

One of many exhibition areas presents what Hockney calls “The Nice Wall”, with reproductions of a whole lot of pictures he has chosen to mirror 5 centuries of portray. The ultimate part overlaying the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contains 29 footage by Van Gogh and solely 34 by all different artists (Cezanne comes second).

In a big room with portraits there may be one in every of Hockney’s companion and studio supervisor Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima. The artist was straight impressed by Van Gogh’s Sorrowing Previous Man (April 1890), painted within the asylum exterior Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. In an interview, Hockney stated that he had requested Gonçalves de Lima to search out the picture and “pull it off the web and print it”.

The dates within the title of the portrait, 11-13 July 2013, trace at an horrific occasion. Simply 4 months earlier Hockney’s younger studio assistant Dominic Elliott had died by suicide.

Together with the early oil portray 30 Sunflowers (1996), the Paris present additionally contains two associated iPad drawings, one in every of six sunflowers in a vase and one other with a single drooping bloom. These echo Van Gogh’s famed nonetheless lifes. 

The handfuls of exhibited footage of blossom within the Paris present are additionally harking back to Van Gogh’s springtime landscapes, one of many Dutchman’s favorite motifs in Provence.

Hockney has been impressed by Van Gogh all through his 70-year profession. He recollects that as a younger artwork scholar in Bradford he travelled to Manchester in 1956 to see an exhibition at its Metropolis Artwork Gallery. The present’s 130 works, together with a model of the yellow Sunflowers, had been lent by Vincent’s nephew V.W. van Gogh (whose assortment later handed to Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum).

Hockney is now 87, however regardless of his age stays exhausting at work. The Paris exhibition’s head curator Suzanne Pagé says the artist turns into a vector of happiness when he picks up a brush, “even when Hockney the person goes by way of tragedy”—though unspoken, presumably a reference to the demise of his studio assistant. Within the catalogue she quotes what Hockney wrote to her in the course of the preparations for the present: “I’m at all times comfortable after I’m portray— identical to Van Gogh was.”

Different Van Gogh information

An intriguing portray previously attributed to Van Gogh is up on the market on 23 Could by the Haarlem auctioneer Bubb Kuyper. The estimate is €70,000-€90,000—an actual discount if genuine, an enormous sum if not. In 1959 it was auctioned as genuine by Parke-Bernet in New York, however its latest whereabouts had been unknown till 2023, when the current proprietor purchased it at an internet public sale hosted by Catawiki, presumably for a comparatively modest sum. The portray is now reproduced in color for the primary time.

Though Mendacity Cow (presumably 1882-83) was accepted within the two Van Gogh catalogues raisonnés by de la Faille (1970) and Hulsker (1996), it’s now doubted by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The Bubb Kuyper catalogue entry brazenly states that the museum’s examination “casts doubt on the authenticity of the work”, though they “can not with 100% certainty declassify it as a piece by Van Gogh”. There are two different Van Gogh work of cows, one in every of which is assumed to be genuine (promoting for $2m in 2008) and the opposite is understood solely from an previous black-and-white copy.

Martin Bailey is a number one Van Gogh specialist and particular correspondent for The Artwork Newspaper. He has curated exhibitions on the Barbican Artwork Gallery, Compton Verney/Nationwide Gallery of Scotland and Tate Britain.

Martin has written quite a lot of bestselling books on Van Gogh’s years in France: The Sunflowers Are Mine: The Story of Van Gogh’s Masterpiece (Frances Lincoln 2013, UK and US), Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence (Frances Lincoln 2016, UK and US), Starry Evening: Van Gogh on the Asylum (White Lion Publishing 2018, UK and US) and Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers and the Artist’s Rise to Fame (Frances Lincoln 2021, UK and US). The Sunflowers are Mine (2024, UK and US) and Van Gogh’s Finale (2024, UK and US) are additionally now out there in a extra compact paperback format.

His different latest books embody Dwelling with Vincent van Gogh: The Properties & Landscapes that formed the Artist (White Lion Publishing 2019, UK and US), which gives an outline of the artist’s life. The Illustrated Provence Letters of Van Gogh has been reissued (Batsford 2021, UK and US). My Buddy Van Gogh/Emile Bernard gives the primary English translation of Bernard’s writings on Van Gogh (David Zwirner Books 2023, UKand US).

To contact Martin Bailey, please e-mail vangogh@theartnewspaper.com

Please word that he doesn’t undertake authentications.

Discover all of Martin’s adventures with Van Gogh right here