Eyes Wide Open, With Stories to Tell

“A View From an Apartment” (2004–5) blends two scenes, those of the domestic
clutter in the foreground and the urban landscape beyond.

By Roberta Smith, The New York Times

Jeff Wall’s large color transparencies mounted on electric light boxes fill 10 galleries at the Museum of Modern Art with a pulsating and purposeful, if slightly sedate, optimism. Alluring to the point of transfixion, the 41 works measure as much as 10 feet high or 16 feet across. These are outright gorgeous, fully equipped all-terrain visual vehicles, intent on being intensely pleasurable while making a point or two about society, art, history, visual perception, the human animal or all of the above.

Dating from 1979, when Mr. Wall was 33, to the present, the photographs draw on a rich tangle of traditions—from landscape and street photography, to still life and genre painting, to Japanese woodblock prints and medical illustration, to Impressionist and Baroque painting....

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Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by Bob Meier: The lengths he goes to create a picture are astounding—hiring dozens of people for $83 a day for week after week until he gets the grouping of the people right for the picture; spending a year recreating a street scene in his studio so he can get the camera placement he wants. These are not documentaries, or historical records—they are complete creations of his own, that he then manipulates in Photoshop, apparently, pixel by pixel! He is able to do all this because the prints sell for as much as a million dollars each. He is a true artist.