David Hockney at Fondation Louis Vuitton: Cigarettes, Scenery and Censorship

Last week, in a minor drama preluding David Hockney’s new exhibition at Paris’ Fondation Louis Vuitton — the biggest of his 70-year career — Paris transport authorities banned the show’s metro station ads because they depict the artist holding a cigarette.

The poster for David Hockney 25 is a Russian nesting doll of sorts: a photograph of Hockney working on his most recent self-portrait, “Play Within a Play Within a Play and Me with a Cigarette” (2025). In both the painting and the photograph, Hockney wears yellow round glasses, a patterned suit and a red tie. In both, he holds a cigarette, though it’s the photographic version which the powers that be objected to.

“The bossiness of those in charge of our lives knows no limits,” Hockney told the Independent in response to the ban. “They only object to the photograph even though I am smoking also in the painting I am holding! I am used to the interfering bossiness of people stopping people making their own choices but this is petty.” (True, the cigarette is barely discernible; also true, the rules on depicting cigarettes in metro advertisements are clear.)

This fleeting episode tells us something essential about the artist. First, of his devotion to smoking. Hockney is a passionate, lifelong smoker. He once wrote: “I couldn’t imagine not smoking; and when people tell me to stop I always point this out. I’ve done it for 68 years, so are you telling me I’m doing something wrong? Fuck off.”

Cigarettes recur throughout the colossal exhibition, which contains more than 400 works exhibited across 11 rooms. One dangles from his lips in a 2012 self-portrait. Smoke rises from his hand in “25th June 2022, Looking at the Flowers,” which depicts two seated versions of the artist admiring a wall of his own paintings. Two packets of cigarettes rest on a table between them — one for each man. In a series of photos captured as he worked on “La Grande Cour (2019), his Camels are closer to hand than his pens.

More meaningfully, Hockney’s response to the ad ban also demonstrates his irrepressibly liberal spirit — a free and unapologetic disposition toward life that permeates his art, and is plainly visible throughout the exhibition. 

David Hockney 25 begins with the sober “Portrait of My Father” (1955), painted while he was a student at Bradford School of Art; surveys his greatest hits, produced during his heady years in Los Angeles — “A Bigger Splash (1967), “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), etc; before focusing on his output during the last 25 years. 

Many of these artworks were created on his iPad. At the Fondation, they are printed on paper and mounted on aluminum at a scale much larger than an iPad screen. Viewers see his strokes and gestures, the pitter patter of his fingers. You can almost discern Hockney’s fingerprints.

The impact of seeing his technique laid so visible is that viewers have an immediate sense of the artist’s touch. It’s one of many reasons why he is one of the 20th and 21st century’s most popular artists. Hockney’s works are large in scale — one, “Bigger Trees Near Warter Or/Ou Peinture Sur Le Motif Pour Le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique” (2007), comprises 50 canvases depicting a row of tall, bare trees, below which yellow flowers begin to bloom.

These works draw viewers into their subjects, which are almost entirely figurative and easy to connect with. Many paintings feature dachshunds, for instance, though this show contains surprisingly few. Or portraits featuring family members, friends, acquaintances and Harry Styles. Or landscape paintings, including “Garrowby Hill” (1998), which renders distant fields as colorful geometric fragments bathed in sunlight. These are vivid, optimistic artworks, and stepping into a room filled with them, as guests at Fondation Louis Vuitton do, has a noticeably warming effect.

Then there is the lovable image of the artist himself: a mop of blond (now white) hair, round glasses, colorful clothing and, somewhere nearby, a cigarette, a symbol of the artist’s mortality and his pursuit of freedom — censors be damned. 

David Hockney 25 is on view until August 31 at Fondation Louis Vuitton.