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Despite his devotion to the ancient practices of painting and drawing--a polemical stand itself in a postpainterly era of video, installation and performance art--Hockney has always loved new technologies and the ways they can serve art. He has spent years developing a theory, not much accepted by art historians, that the emergence of precise illusionism in 15th century Western painting was due to the quiet adoption by artists of new optical devices that let them more or less trace complex backgrounds, figures and faces. In his portraits Hockney has sometimes used one, the camera lucida, a prism that casts the model's image onto a sheet of paper. And as newer devices came along, he's made fax pictures, ink-jet-printed computer images and all those drawings on iPhones and iPads.
Still, they're no match for the beautifully intricate charcoal drawings that Hockney made earlier this year to record the return of spring to Yorkshire, with their dense fields of granular observation. Likewise his best portraits lately aren't usually the oils and computer images but the drawings, complex and deeply considered freehand excursions, a low-tech practice carried out at the high pitch of capability he possesses.
Pleasures like those pop up all around "A Bigger Exhibition." That's how you know Hockney would have been better served by a smaller one.