The Fondation Louis Vuitton by Frank Gehry with David Hockney and Gerhard Richter – three old masters under one roof.
In 2025 and then again in 2026, I visited the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris’ sensational Frank Gehry designed art gallery which opened in 2014. It is set like a giant sailing ship in Paris’ vast parkland known as the Bois de Boulogne. I was as excited to see the Gehry architecture as I was to see the art displayed there – in 2025 it was home for the largest retrospective exhibition ever held for the grand old Yorkshireman, David Hockney. On 2026, this February, I was back to see another giant show – this time of the works of the great German artist, Gerhard Richter. All three of these artists were in or around their nineties, but sadly, six months after my first visit, one of them, Frank Gehry died at the age of 96.
I was sad to hear of his death, especially so as I had read that he had carried on working on architectural projects right up to the end. The world has definitely lost one of its most imaginative and original architects. I first came across his work, quite literally, when I visited the University of Minnesota in 1996, and I have to use an American phrase to best describe my first sight of Gehry’s Frederick R. Weisman’s building which was then only three years old. I was gobsmacked! I had not only never seen anything like it, but I could hardly believe that building with those wild curves and contours was even possible. It’s true to say that I have seen modern architecture differently ever since and each new building for me has to stand comparison with Frank Gehry’s finest.
So I was genuinely thrilled to get the chance to come to his vast 2014 Exhibition building in Paris. How many times can a guy get gobsmacked by a piece of architecture? Sadly, Frank Gehry won’t be around to build any more. On that day in July 2025, he was still working, and I was in awe, yet again. So, like me, before you see the great artists’ work inside, just enjoy the great artist who made this wonderful place.
David Hockney Retrospective
David Hockney is a mere 88 years old, and he, like Frank Gehry at that age and later, is still very much at work. This giant retrospective show of Hockney’s work, over 400 paintings and installations covering his career from 1955 until, now, and this is literally true, he was still adding work as the show opened.
All the famous works, like A Bigger Splash were there, as well as representative work through the fifty years celebrated here in Paris. Everyone loves his colours and none more than those sun-kissed paintings from his days in California, but colour has remained a joy, as could be seen here from the paintings he made in the more northerly climes of Yorkshire, England, and Normandy, France. I was returning to an earlier memory of another great man with David Hockney, as I produced a television series in 1990 called The Great North Show and in one of the films we documented Hockney’s then current enthusiasm, his Fax Art. For the filming , he was in Los Angeles on his Fax Machine actively creating a new work of art to send, and we were in Yorkshire at Salt Air Mill at a fax machine at our end. It felt like the early days of the telephone, we filmed his series of faxed pages with live telephone instructions from the artist himself. It was very exciting to be there ,somehow, in on the creative act. Throughout , as each new page was put in place on the exhibition wall, Hockney was dryly humorous and totally confident in what was then an early experiment on his road to iPad art and his other ideas for expanding the concept of an artist’s tools. Some of his iPad art was in this exhibition. I have put one of them into this blog – The Moon, 10th September, 2020. Like Frank Gehry, David Hockney never stops experimenting.
House and Car, Normandy, 2020
Gerhard Richter Retrospective
In February this year, I came back to Paris and to the wonderful Fondation Louis Vuitton, but sadly Frank Gehry had died, two months earlier, in December 2025. The third ‘Old Master’ in this blog, is Gerhard Richter, another restless artist always looking for new ways to express difficult thoughts. This show too covers the whole of Richter’s career, with works from the mid-sixties up until the present day. Gerhard Richter, now 94 years old, is still working, but mostly in ink and watercolours. He is still trying to find ways of going beyond the image, like a composer searching for the sublime silence beyond musical notes.
The influence of his early work in photography and figurative painting have remained somewhere in his imagination even in his most abstract canvases. His photographs seemed to beg for his paint brush or some other way of adding dimensions to what had already been imagined and captured on camera. They also want to cross over into a painting, a marriage of media, on the artist’s journey to what llies beyond an image. Richter started to over-paint on his photographs and the style gradually led to over-painting on his paintings too. He was experimenting with colour, texture and, maybe, abstractions beyond the abstract, even looking beyond the minimalist, and finding colours in grey and the power of a pencil simple line. I was lucky in 2014, to have come across his work in a new exhibition at the Neue Nationgalerie in Berlin (another great modern building, designed by Ludwig Mies Vander Rohe). The exhibition was based around Richter’s new work, Birkenau (2014), four giant abstract paintings based on harrowingly vivid snapshot-style photos taken in secret by concentration camp prisoners and showing the horrifying last moments of some of the Birkenau victims on their way to the gas chambers. The chilling photographs were on display here in Paris, and the impact of Richter’s abstractions was made all the more profound. with the comparison. For me, having seen the four Birkenau paintings before, meant that the whole of this new exhibition was a journey towards those paintings again. I thought, going round this large exhibition, that I could see how Richter painstakingly forged his way through developing styles to get this level of emotional depth, emotion that was added as another layer of paint over many years of experiments.
