SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present the exhibition Jeff Wall, a retrospective survey of the artist’s career from the late 1970s to the present, on view from October 27, 2007, through January 27, 2008. Co-organized by SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra and Peter Galassi, chief curator of photography, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, the exhibition features some 40 of Wall’s major light-box photographs and four black-and-white gelatin silver prints, tracing his principal themes and pictorial strategies.

Wall (Canadian, b. 1946) is widely recognized as one of the most influential, adventurous, and inventive artists of his generation. Since 1978 he has worked principally with large-scale color photographs presented as transparencies in light boxes. His distinctive pictorial universe ranges from gritty realism to elaborate fantasy, drawing upon an unusually broad spectrum of sources that includes 19th-century painting, Conceptual art, narrative cinema, and modernist photography. The exhibition presents a selection of ambitious and celebrated works, including Picture for Women (1979); Mimic (1982); The Storyteller (1986); A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) (1993); After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (1999–2000); Tattoos and Shadows (2000); and In front of a nightclub (2006), a newly promised gift to SFMOMA.

Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he still lives and works, Wall began painting and drawing seriously as a teenager. He studied art history at the University of British Columbia, where he earned a master’s degree in 1970 with a thesis on Dada in Berlin. At this time, Vancouver was rapidly becoming a vibrant artistic center, and by the late 1960s Wall’s own work was closely attuned to the most recent developments in Minimalism and Conceptual art. In 1970 his Landscape Manual (1969–70), a 56-page black-and-white pamphlet of photographs and text, was exhibited at MoMA in Information, the influential survey of Conceptual art.

Wall was dissatisfied with his work at this time, however. He moved to London to pursue a doctorate in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and he soon stopped making art altogether. During his three years in London, he read widely in philosophy, the history and criticism of art and film, and the growing field of critical theory. He saw many films, and by the time he returned to Vancouver in the spring of 1973, he had decided to commit himself to filmmaking. Although he admired experimental cinema, his touchstone was postwar Neo-Realism in the broadest sense—films that used conventional narrative structures to deal imaginatively with everyday life.

Wall started teaching art and art history in 1974, and in 1976 he was appointed assistant professor at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver. None of his filmmaking projects had come to fruition, and he was eager to begin making art again. He had become close to the American artist Dan Graham and, like Graham, felt that the Conceptual art movement had reached an impasse. In the wake of the Conceptual art crisis, Wall aimed to rebuild the rebellious spirit of Modernism from the ground up. The distinctiveness of his art ever since has derived largely from the intensity with which he felt that mandate, his willingness to devote considerable resources of time and energy to entirely untested prospects, and his wide-ranging passion for and curiosity about images and ideas. The initial elements were certain aspects of cinema and painting, brought together in an unusual photographic medium.

Wall began working in the SFU studios, where, like a filmmaker, he could build sets, control lighting, rehearse actors, and otherwise create an entirely fictional image. He adopted the term “cinematography” to summarize his approach, which he believed could greatly enrich the potential of still photography. Another significant facet of Wall’s new aesthetic was his sense that post-Renaissance painting could serve as a vital resource for contemporary art. On his first visit to the Museo del Prado in Madrid in the summer of 1977, he was deeply affected by the work of Diego Velázquez, Francisco de Goya, and others, and he sought in his own art to emulate the commanding physical presence and pictorial power of Western painting’s grand theater of human figures in action.

In Wall’s view, color photography—then widely regarded as vulgar and commercial—was an ideal medium, in part because it distanced his work from the contemporaneous revival of figure painting that he regarded as a betrayal of avant-garde principles. Backlit transparencies had become common in advertising, and Wall embraced the commercial association as essential to the socially critical dimension of his art.

The initial phase of Wall’s light-box work is represented in the exhibition by The Destroyed Room (1978), Picture for Women (1979), and Double Self-Portrait (1979). The first two works allude to famous 19th-century French paintings by Eugène Delacroix and Édouard Manet, respectively, and were originally conceived to address the circumstance of women under capitalism. But the pictures’ pictorial sources, as well as their critical goals, have been thoroughly transformed through a complex admixture of Conceptual strategies and political and theoretical concerns.

The first photographs that Wall made outdoors, in 1980, were three panoramic landscapes—assertions that his art would not be limited to studio fictions. These straightforward views, like most of Wall’s subsequent landscapes, belong to a long photographic tradition of examining man’s presence in the land. The genre is represented in the exhibition by Steves Farm, Steveston (1980); The Old Prison (1987); and Coastal Motifs (1989).

Wall also left the studio to make such works as Mimic (1982) and Milk (1984), both of which were inspired by incidents that he had observed on the street. He hired nonprofessional actors and restaged these incidents for the tripod-bound, large-format camera that he needed in order to produce images adequately rich in detail for his large transparencies. This way of working, combined with a focus on people at the margins of society, has shaped a central vein of Wall’s art ever since. He summarized the program as “the painting of modern life,” a phrase associated with the work of Manet and derived from a celebrated essay by Charles Baudelaire titled “The Painter of Modern Life.” In Milk, the liquid explosion caused by the man’s abrupt gesture, set against the bleak geometry of the city, makes a vivid image of distress. As in Baudelaire’s prose poems, the gritty reality of the street is transformed into a striking emblem of contemporary experience.

In the late 1980s Wall developed his modern-life imagery in two major pictures that step back to take in a broad view and incorporate a larger cast of characters: The Storyteller (1986) and An Eviction (1988; revised 2004). The former describes a gathering of indigent descendents of Canada’s first peoples on the embankment of a highway overpass. Wall took the picture’s theme and its title from an essay by Walter Benjamin that held up the premodern figure of the storyteller as an embodiment of, in Wall’s words, “the memory of values excluded by capitalist progress.” Although the artist has since questioned the socially progressive spirit of the picture, his many photographs that describe the marginal and dispossessed (e.g., Overpass, 2001) or acknowledge racial and ethnic diversity (e.g., Trân Dúc Ván, 1988/2003, and Tattoos and Shadows, 2000) have achieved a sustained quality of genuine attention, unmarred by condescension or sentimentality.