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But in too many of these paintings, size inflation doesn't do much to intensify the experience, especially with the pictures Hockney has been making on iPhones and iPads. Because he's a wizardly draftsman, he can coax miracles of detailed drawing out of a PaintBox app. Even so, when those images are blown up and printed at large scale they go dead. Amplification just exposes their bland passages and empty transitions. And after a while his many small watercolors make you think of Renoir's late nudes--sunlit, numerous and a bit complacent.
This may be why Hockney keeps trying to shake up the game with various formal devices. In some of the big composite paintings, each component canvas has a thin wooden perimeter. Taken together they impose a modernist grid across the assembled image, dividing it into bordered zones that deliberately frustrate your impulse to enter the coherent illusion of a scene. But there's not much here to match the crazy-quilt intelligence of Hockney's Cubist landscapes of the 1980s, like Mulholland Drive and A Visit With Christopher and Don, a riff on the side-to-side narrative of Chinese scroll painting in which he gets a single canvas to lay before you a roller-coastering day's worth of sights, indoors and out. Pleasure has always been a categorical imperative for Hockney, but the real power of his best work has been in the way he linked his sensuality to rigorous formal invention. Here? Not so much.
Which is surprising, since Hockney still has his pedagogical side, his tireless impulse to school us about the shortcomings of single-point perspective and show us how much more fun you can have when you look at something from many sides. For decades he's been Cubism's truest true believer, insisting that nothing less than multiple perspectives can convey the real darting-around experience of looking. (He has a point there.) It was to solve that problem that he produced his canny photo collages of the 1980s, combining multiple Polaroids or prints, each taken from a slightly different vantage point and sometimes over a period of minutes or even hours. The result was an unstable picture plane, embedded with diverse moments and perspectives, that your delighted eye navigated like an ice floe. In the same vein, among his new videos are four made by taking a car mounted with nine minicameras down the same wooded road in various seasons, each lens pointed in a slightly different direction. What that produces is a nine-screen video mural with that same undulant ice-floe surface, one that also nods to the faceted picture plane that the Cubists borrowed from Cézanne. The effect is mesmerizing.