Every child is an artist until he’s told he’s not an artist. John Lennon

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. Pablo Picasso

Creativity is intelligence having fun. Albert Einstein

On our last day in Paris, we went to the David Hockney show at the Foundation Louis Vuitton in a building designed by Frank Gehry. It was a major show by Britain’s most influential contemporary artist, in a building by, arguably, the most influential architect of our time, but for me, our lunch was the artistic high point. Before we saw the show, we had lunch at Le Frank, the museum’s cafe, run by Jean-Louis Nomicos.

Much, maybe most, food is a combination of ingredients. Not usually, but often, I would prefer the ingredients separately. I don’t want a great tomato buried in a hamburger; I would rather have it on the side. The same goes for pickles. Once, maybe twenty years ago, at a Chinese restaurant in the old Westfield Center in San Francisco – I’m pretty sure it was M.Y. China – I had a Kung Pow Chicken that had been deconstructed into its component parts. It was delicious and I still remember it.

I had my second deconstructed dish at Jean-Louis Nomicos’ Le Frank, a Caesar salad, with caramelized chicken with a hat of fried parmesan cheese. I loved it. It was delicious, especially the solid core of the Romaine lettuce slathered with a very thick Ceaser dressing. Sitting outside with Michele on a warm afternoon, next to a garden overlooked by a golden Takashi Murakami sculpture, eating this deconstructed Ceaser salad, it is hard to ignore that I am extraordinarily fortunate.

I’ve already said that Frank Gehry designed the Fondation Louis Vuitton building, but I want to emphasize that because the building influences a large part of the museum experience, including my deconstructed salad. The Fondation Louis Vuitton says the structure is characterized by a combination of solid “iceberg” volumes and expansive, glass “sails”. According to several sources, the sails are glass to get around Parisian height-restricting zoning laws, but the basic deconstructed motif goes back to, at least, Gehry’s early days in Southern California.

We all have watched athletes degrade, but it is harder to see mental degradation, including creativity, but the degradation is there. I still remember a study on age and creativity done by the University of California – Berkeley in the very late 1950s, while I was in college, majoring in Industrial Psychology. I don’t remember all the creative fields that were in the study, but I do remember that Chemistry was the field that its practitioners peaked earliest at about 28, and Architects peaked the latest at about 46. Frank Gehry has peaked.

The design process for Fondation Louis Vuitton started about 2001, which means that Gehry was about 72. Wandering through this Frank Gehry building, it is hard to think this is the high point of Frank Gehry’s career. Outside, the iceberg and sail motif is fairly easy to read, but inside, it gets very confusing. But more germane, the building does not seem that original. It just seems like a less coherent rehash of what Frank Gehry has been doing repeatedly for the last fifty years.

That is not to say that this Gehry building isn’t interesting; it is. It just isn’t as interesting – or as influential – as buildings he designed forty years ago. One nice touch, though, is that we tourists are allowed on the roof, where we can get a view of tourist Paris one way and business Paris the other way, although neither view is unrestricted.

I think of David Hockney as an LA artist, partially because he was painting in LA when I first became aware of him, and partially because his colors seem so LAish. LA is also where Hockney first got interested in photography, and I think his photography, with its manipulation of perspective, is fabulous.

As an aside, about twenty years ago – plus or minus – Michele was taking a photography class in which she did a photo collage of Point Lobos. During the critique of the class, the teacher mentioned that Michele’s photograph was like David Hockney’s Pearblossom Highway. When she told me she had been compared to David Hockney, I was sooo jealous. End aside.

The David Hockney show is billed as a retrospective of the last twenty-five years of his work, and it is exuberant and accessible (and the galleries were full of art aficionados, making it hard to see the huge pieces). Wandering the show, which was huge, I was reminded of a Dorothy Parker quote: First you write for yourself, then you write for your friends, then you write for money. Much of the show seemed to fall into the third category. Again, that is not to say that the later Hockney works were not terrific; they are, they just seem a little perfunctory.

What I especially liked were Hockney’s portraits, which I hadn’t seen before, and it also gave me the chance to take my own portrait of a very bored guard. All in all, it was a great show and a great way to end our stay in Paris.