Sold for: $121,250

PROVENANCE
White Cube, London, 2009
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
Rolf Lauter, editor, Jeff Wall: Figures & Places: Selected Works from 1978 - 2000, 2001, mentioned pages 51 and 53, reproduced, unpaginated
Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, 2008, page 72, reproduced page 53

One cannot overemphasize the importance of Jeff Wall’s photographs in the international art world, both now and over the past several decades. One of the most discussed and celebrated Canadian artists of any time, his reputation is well earned. He is a constant innovator in photography and an acute writer about art’s roles in society. He strives to see what photography is and can be. “The historical image I want to create is one which recognizes the complexity of the experiences we must have every day in developing relationships with the past,” he states.

One of his tactics, on display in Diagonal Composition II, is to enter into conversation (rather than competition) with significant artworks and artists from the past, especially the “fathers” of modernism such as Édouard Manet, whose groundbreaking 1882 painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère Wall restaged for the 1970s in the epically scaled backlit Cibachrome photograph Picture for Women (1979). He began using this “real world” technology – borrowed from advertising – in 1978, capitalizing on the glow of the image and, often, its large scale. How might the smaller and more humble Diagonal Composition II keep company with Wall’s more dramatic photographic essays?

The work is disorienting at first, but we come to see that it is taken from a high, vertical angle into the corner of an unlovely room in which the filthy sink, wall and floor seem to compete for abuse. Unlike Picture for Women and most of Wall’s work, there is no clear narrative here, yet the backlit image radiates an unexpected allure, beckoning us to look harder because there is “nothing to see.” With time, we appreciate vibrant colour, contrasting textures, and in general the materiality of the stuff we contemplate. Why look? Because the image is about looking at the everyday, about recording that process instead of seeing through the photograph to a storyline.

Unexpectedly too, several aspects of Diagonal Composition II ally it to Wall’s ongoing examination of the powerful modern tradition in Western painting. Perhaps it glancingly refers to the concatenation of materials fundamental to synthetic Cubism. More persuasively, from its title to its appearance, the photograph enters into a dialogue with abstract art in the West, particularly that of the early twentieth century. In this context, subject matter itself was not always primary. Wall might have titled the piece In My Studio Basement but did not. Instead, one strain of the modernist theory of abstraction claims that images supply their own internal reference points, in this case, the interactions of colour, texture and composition. Even without the laconic but nonetheless leading title, we look for and find diagonal lines. Perhaps the most significant angle traces from the elevated viewpoint, which inscribes the presence of the photographer witnessing this scene. Abstract paintings are, of course, notorious for having neutral titles just like the one here, and appearing in seemingly random numbered series, suggesting that the viewer look at what is presented, not for an extra-pictorial narrative.

Diagonal Composition II is significant in the artist’s career because its manner of composition is relatively unorchestrated (he calls this sort of photograph “documentary”), a dramatic difference from Wall’s characteristic practice of posing scenes with actors and manipulating them digitally (which he calls “cinematographic”). Yet he returned to versions of this still life composition three times between 1993 and 2000, seeing and recording variations. Even this scene of neglect becomes “aesthetic” in that it is a matter of conscious selection and, ironically, dramatic presentation. He turns on the light, literally and metaphorically.

We thank Mark Cheetham, Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto, for contributing the above essay. Cheetham is the author of two books on abstract art: The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting and Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure since the 60s.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars