David Hockney’s iPad drawings and portraits on show at NGV, Melbourne

The NGV David Hockney exhibition does little to vindicate the gallery’s claim he is Britain’s greatest living painter.

Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007) by David Hockney.

The press release for the National Gallery of Victoria’s David Hockney exhibition confidently describes him as Britain’s greatest living painter, an assertion that, although on the face of it mere marketing hyperbole, actually deserves a moment’s consideration. For while he undoubtedly possesses considerable talent, most clearly demonstrated in his drawings and prints, it is hard to argue that Hockney is truly a great painter by serious historical standards. Nor does this exhibition, for all its interest, do anything to vindicate such a claim.

The other curious thing about this assertion is that for most of his career, like other 20th-century painters of what can loosely be called realist inspiration, Hockney worked on the margins of the contemporary art scene. His art did not conform to any of the fashions successively endorsed by the art establishment in the feverish pursuit of relevance, career and profit. But with the passing of time and the waning of fashions, it has turned out time and again that those artists who were still trying to engage with the elusive world of visual appearance tended to produce images of more lasting appeal.

Such was the case with Lucian Freud, for example, the previous holder of the title of Britain’s greatest living painter. But whereas Freud engaged with the great tradition of figure painting with such vigour and almost brutal energy that no one could complain that the medium of oil painting was too traditional, Hockney has never had that kind of painterly depth: his work is illustrative and anecdotal, rather than engaging in the profound painterly metamorphosis of the world that we admire in the greatest painters of the past 500 years or more.

The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011; Barry Humphries, 26-28 March 2015.

And this is why it is so significant that the works with which we are greeted in the opening rooms of the present exhibition should be drawings made on iPads. This is not just the greatest example of product placement in contemporary art, but a choice of technology that allows a series of inherently very simple drawings to be taken seriously as contemporary art: had these images been executed in pastel, for example, it is hard to imagine that they would have been greeted with anything like the same interest by the tastemakers of the art world.

As it is, the irony of these iPad drawings is that they allow both the artist and the viewer to enjoy, and to ponder, the simplest level of engagement with the world as we encounter it through the sense of sight. These drawings are not examples of the profound metamorphosis mentioned just now, nor are they visionary or imaginative pictures of an inner world. They are elementary attempts to represent fragments of the artist’s surroundings, and yet in the process they manage to reveal something of the mystery of picture-making.

For the moment you try to represent the humblest motif, you are confronted with two different problems. The first is to see what it is that you need to represent, and the second is to find the way to produce a visual equivalent in the medium you are employing. The uninitiated are unaware of either problem, and that is why they imagine there is something inherently easy or straightforward about the representation of appearances; modernist ideology tended to disparage it as mere copying.

But the slightest experience of drawing or painting teaches us, as I have observed before, that there is no such thing as copying. In the first place, the object of representation itself is elusive: beginners cannot draw what they see because they do not really see it at all; we perceive the world through a series of cognitive defaults and shortcuts that the artist learns to undo in order to reveal a relatively more objective version of appearance, although ultimately the world we encounter is not objective at all.

And then we come to the second problem of producing visual equivalents in a given medium — pencil, ink, paint — for the phenomena of perception. Here, suffice it to say that no simple matching is possible between things intrinsically unlike. All representation, consequently, is really a process of making, of artificial construction, and of significant choices.

The exhibition reveals these processes at work in a huge collection of sketches: the motifs are not inherently beautiful or important, but attest to an artist’s profound and almost compulsive drive to work, and equally profound fascination with giving an account of the most modest, even banal aspects of his surroundings.

A number of pictures are views through a window, and we can see the interplay of observation and artifice in the planes of light and shade that compose the frame and the sash window, as well as in the combinations of light and shade that define the form of a vase, a bonsai tree or some other smaller motif. Elsewhere it is the highlight on the rim of a glass or cup, or the difference in tone and hue of light and shadow sides of a form, or the cast shadow that makes a vessel sit on a table.

The medium, in this case, is the palette available in the iPad painting application, and for all the range provided, the colours remain cold, crude and mechanical compared to the subtlety and painterly unity that could be achieved in oil or watercolour. But all art works with formal constraints, and although the resulting images are limited in their aesthetic appeal, there is a kind of pathos intrinsic to this very limitation.

The most important advantage of the iPad medium, however, is that we are able to follow all the processes just described in sequence: every step in the drawing is remembered by the computer and can be replayed as an animation, so that we see outlines being corrected, colours adjusted, light and shade modified to articulate form. And this is where the artist’s quest to give an account of the simplest details of the phenomenal world becomes both absorbing and poignant for the viewer.

It is as though, clumsy as the digital painting technology is compared to any manual process, it somehow speaks to us in a new way, and reawakens us to the complexity of the world around us. Thus it is not surprising to find the same process applied to landscapes in subsequent rooms, once again with both animated versions and completed prints. The effect here, however, though sometimes pleasing, is not quite as satisfying as with the smaller pieces.

It is not hard to see why this is: the smaller drawings are shown on a scale closer to the actual size of the screen, whereas the much enlarged landscape subjects reveal the scratchy drawing of the iPad stylus, and the lack of subtlety and layering in colour and tone is far more apparent. At the same time, the smaller works are of simple still-life motifs for the most part, quiet reflections of the artist’s environment, whereas the landscape invites us to a deeper and more transcendent vision, to which the medium is not ideally suited.

More successful is the enormous — and handpainted — Bigger Trees Near Warter on multiple panels, exhibited in a room where it is duplicated on the facing wall and reproduced in cropped form on the two shorter side walls. The subject is a stand of trees, leafless in late winter or early spring, next to a farmhouse and barn, but it is very hard to know what the motif might have looked like from a single point of view, because of the way it has been produced.

In effect the picture is painted on 50 large panels — five high and 10 wide — and each of these is executed from a different spot from left to right and from top to bottom.

Instead of subordinating the whole view to a single point of view, in other words, Hockney has painted each of the 50 panels from its own point of view, although each panel joins up with its neighbours, so that the viewer is overwhelmed and absorbed in the expanded view of a small copse.

This enormous and complex painting is an implicit critique of one-point perspective and even more specifically a critique of the camera’s view of the world, which is the much later mechanical realisation of the visual model effectively devised in the Renaissance. Hockney’s process attempts to place the emphasis on the natural phenomena — on the life of the trees — rather than on the point of view of the human observer.

The Group XI, 7-11 July 2014 by David Hockney.

A similar concern lies behind the enormous film works in another room, multi-screen views of woodland roads along which we seem to be moving, although the sections of the view represented by each of the screens do not join up properly. These screens represent in fact the different views taken by a grid of cameras for much the same purpose as in the painting: that is, to show each section from an equally prioritised frontal view, instead of subordinating the whole scene to a central vanishing point that valorises human movement and purpose.

The series 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life (2013-16), which occupies a long, hall-like space, may seem at first sight like a completely different proposition. The series was painted from life and in acrylic, each over a period of three days. The sitters are all friends and acquaintances of the artist; the single still life is explained by the non-appearance of the scheduled sitter and the artist’s unwillingness to interrupt the routine of the project.

Perhaps, however, these multiple portraits do have something in common with the 50 panels of Hockney’s composite landscape, for in each case there is a concern for dispassionate objectivity and an attempt to eliminate the subjective dimension of the artist’s perspective. But here the aesthetic choice is not entirely successful: the portraits are, as far as we can tell, reasonably good likenesses, with a sense of the characteristic bearing and attitude of each individual, and yet there is little or no depth or suggestion of inner life.

The reason for this is that in a portrait the artist’s perspective is not a matter of vanishing points, although the space is also deliberately flat and neutral: it is rather the psychological perspective and indeed the mutual connection between artist and sitter that make a good portrait the crystallisation of a relationship. And it is not only through an accurate rendering of face and body, but through their integration into a pictorial whole composed of space, colour and light that the painter conveys this invisible, intersubjective understanding.

The idea of a large series, although it makes the most of Hockney’s abilities and distracts from his limitations, cannot endow the individual portraits with qualities that they do not inherently possess.

David Hockney: Current

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, until March 13.