paris metro bans david hockney poster ahead of fondation louis vuitton exhibition

David Hockney beneath Gehry’s glass sails

Next week, the Fondation Louis Vuitton will become a canvas for the largest showcase ever staged of David Hockey’s work. While the museum was designed by Frank Gehry to evoke wind-filled sails floating in the Bois de Boulogne, its translucent forms are about to be reinterpreted by one of modern art’s most freewheeling minds. The David Hockney Paris exhibition, opening April 9th and running through August 31st, will occupy all eleven of the museum’s galleries with over four hundred works spanning seven decades. But unlike typical retrospectives, this one has been shaped in part by Hockney himself, who brings the full weight of his vision into play.

image courtesy Fondation Louis Vuitton

promotions stifled by unexpected censorship

In a controversial twist, David Hockney exhibition posters intended for the Paris Metro network have been pulled — not for their art, but for what the artist is doing in a promotional photograph. In the image, Hockney is seated beside a new self-portrait, titled Play within a Play within a Play and Me with a Cigarette, and is holding a cigarette. Lawyers for the Paris public transport authority contacted the artist to inform him that the image cannot be used in Metro advertising.

The ban, based on French advertising laws that prohibit public promotion of smoking, extends only to the photograph — not the painting, despite both featuring Hockney with cigarette in hand. The 87-year-old artist has described the decision as ‘complete madness,’ calling it an example of the ‘bossiness’ he has opposed his entire life. For Hockney, smoking is symbolic of individual freedom. That sentiment is shared by curator Sir Norman Rosenthal, who called the move ‘beyond comprehension’ and a disservice to a city long associated with revolution, resistance, and artistic liberty.

David Hockney, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972

It’s fitting that the David Hockney Paris exhibition opens with the artist’s 1955 portrait of his father — a man who disapproved of smoking — right as the French transport system tries to stamp out an image of the same habit. This juxtaposition only deepens the exhibition’s relevance: it’s not just a chronological showcase, but a statement on the tensions between freedom and control, tradition and progress, the personal and the public. Hockney, who continues to paint daily, reminds us through this expansive, genre-defying show that art remains a place where rebellion can still bloom.