LIGHT LANDSCAPE, LIFE

David Hockney's paintings can be read as his life story. But a new exhibition at Paris's Fondation Louis Vuitton also shows us just how much he taught us to see.

- By Dodie Kazanjian.

"The king came here last Monday," David Hockney tells me when I visit him recently via Zoom at his London house and adjoining studio. "We talked for an hour, and the next day, when he was making Tracey Emin a dame, he told her he'd been to my studio. I don't know what she thought of that." The 87-year-old artist looks the way he always has, a bit diminished but jaunty and stylish as ever. His signature black-rimmed eyeglasses, huge and round, are bright yellow now. His hair is thinning and white. He's wearing a turquoise sweater, a black-and-white checkerboard tie, and one of the nine patterned suits made for him by his favorite tailor in Cannes-it's the same suit he wears when he's painting, and the same one he's wearing in his latest self-portrait.

When we speak, he's sitting at a cluttered table in his living room, in front of a floor-to-ceiling red velvet curtain. Tess, the beloved dachshund belonging to him and his partner Jean-Pierre (JP) Gonçalves de Lima, is barking somewhere else in the house. I ask him about the "End Bossiness Soon" button on his lapel. "I was going to put 'End Bossiness Now, but then I thought that is in itself too bossy. There's lots of bossy people around now, more than there used to be." He lights a cigarette, somewhat defiantly, and inhales. The lining of his suit jacket is decorated with images of cigars. "I smoke anything,"he says, when I ask him if he smokes cigars as well. "I've lived long enough.