Wall’s Dead Troops Talk fetches more than $3.6 million Randy Boswell, Postmedia News, Wednesday, May 9, 2012
A gruesome, large-scale battlefield picture of conversing corpses by acclaimed Canadian photographer Jeff Wall has smashed the artist’s all-time price record and become the single most valuable photographic artwork ever produced in this country.
The 1992 photograph titled Dead Troops Talk, in which Wall set up a macabre scene showing a group of Soviet soldiers talking to each other after being killed in the Soviet-Afghan war in 1986, sold Tuesday for more than $3.6 million at a Christie’s auction in New York.
The hammer price for the photograph, displayed as a transparency in a 2.3-x-4.2-metre backlit frame, was about double the pre-sale estimate, which had placed the value of the work at between $1.5 million and $2 million. Wall took the photograph at a suburban Vancouver studio after arranging a group of actors dressed in military garb. Dead Troops Talk is widely hailed as the world-renowned B.C. artist Wall’s single most important creation.The fictitious image shows the unit of Red Army soldiers somehow reanimated after their deaths at the hands of rebel mujahedeen.
Men killed minutes earlier by enemy fire, their mortal wounds clearly visible in some cases, are suddenly alive and wearing expressions of horror or — oddly — humour as they engage in conversation with each other and their assailants calmly observe the strange battlefield spectacle.
The photograph was auctioned as part of Christie’s sale of a world-class, $100-million collection of modern art amassed by the late Philadelphia businessman-philanthropist David Pincus and his wife Gerry.
The centrepiece lot offered was Russian-American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko’s “magisterial” 1961 canvas Orange, Red, Yellow, which had been expected to attract a top bid of about $40 million. It sold for about $87 million.
“The Pincus Collection is an extraordinary representation of the most important moments in postwar and contemporary art, from Mark Rothko to Jeff Wall,” Laura Paulson, Christie’s deputy chairman of modern art, had said in announcing the sale. “It represents a lifetime of collecting the best.”
Wall’s photograph, one of only two reproductions of the image apart from the artist’s proof, has been the centrepiece of exhibitions in museums and galleries around the globe. The Canadian artist is widely celebrated for his unique photographic style, typified by the staging of provocative scenes in contemporary settings that often reference major historical works of art.
Dead Troops Talk — which carries the subtitle “A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986” — has been described as modern art’s finest tribute to Spanish artist Francisco Goya’s epic series of prints Disasters of War, which features graphic images of the victims of military clashes between Spain and Napoleonic France in the early 1800s.
Wall himself has offered insights into the origins of the work: “I had a sudden notion of a dialogue of the dead, coming from I don’t know where,” he told one interviewer. “It had nothing to do with the Afghan war, but the subjects needed to be soldiers because it seemed important that they would have died in an official capacity, that would surely give them something to talk about.” Wall is the only Canadian photographer whose work has cracked the $1-million mark at auction, according to
Vancouver-based Heffel Fine Art’s comprehensive database of prices paid for artwork produced in this country. Wall’s 1989 image titled The Well sold for $1.1 million at a 2008 Sotheby’s sale in London, and another titled The Forest sold for just over $1 million at a Sotheby’s sale in New York the same year.The Vancouver-born Wall, 65, was named an officer of the Order of Canada in 2007 and the next year received the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement, British Columbia’s highest award in visual arts. In the 1960s, Wall was selling freelance illustrations to the Vancouver Sun for about $20 apiece.
Wall’s Dead Troops Talk fetches more than $3.6 million Randy Boswell, Postmedia News, Wednesday, May 9, 2012
A gruesome, large-scale battlefield picture of conversing corpses by acclaimed Canadian photographer Jeff Wall has smashed the artist’s all-time price record and become the single most valuable photographic artwork ever produced in this country.
The 1992 photograph titled Dead Troops Talk, in which Wall set up a macabre scene showing a group of Soviet soldiers talking to each other after being killed in the Soviet-Afghan war in 1986, sold Tuesday for more than $3.6 million at a Christie’s auction in New York.
The hammer price for the photograph, displayed as a transparency in a 2.3-x-4.2-metre backlit frame, was about double the pre-sale estimate, which had placed the value of the work at between $1.5 million and $2 million. Wall took the photograph at a suburban Vancouver studio after arranging a group of actors dressed in military garb. Dead Troops Talk is widely hailed as the world-renowned B.C. artist Wall’s single most important creation.The fictitious image shows the unit of Red Army soldiers somehow reanimated after their deaths at the hands of rebel mujahedeen.
Men killed minutes earlier by enemy fire, their mortal wounds clearly visible in some cases, are suddenly alive and wearing expressions of horror or — oddly — humour as they engage in conversation with each other and their assailants calmly observe the strange battlefield spectacle.
The photograph was auctioned as part of Christie’s sale of a world-class, $100-million collection of modern art amassed by the late Philadelphia businessman-philanthropist David Pincus and his wife Gerry.
The centrepiece lot offered was Russian-American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko’s “magisterial” 1961 canvas Orange, Red, Yellow, which had been expected to attract a top bid of about $40 million. It sold for about $87 million.
“The Pincus Collection is an extraordinary representation of the most important moments in postwar and contemporary art, from Mark Rothko to Jeff Wall,” Laura Paulson, Christie’s deputy chairman of modern art, had said in announcing the sale. “It represents a lifetime of collecting the best.”
Wall’s photograph, one of only two reproductions of the image apart from the artist’s proof, has been the centrepiece of exhibitions in museums and galleries around the globe. The Canadian artist is widely celebrated for his unique photographic style, typified by the staging of provocative scenes in contemporary settings that often reference major historical works of art.
Dead Troops Talk — which carries the subtitle “A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986” — has been described as modern art’s finest tribute to Spanish artist Francisco Goya’s epic series of prints Disasters of War, which features graphic images of the victims of military clashes between Spain and Napoleonic France in the early 1800s.
Wall himself has offered insights into the origins of the work: “I had a sudden notion of a dialogue of the dead, coming from I don’t know where,” he told one interviewer. “It had nothing to do with the Afghan war, but the subjects needed to be soldiers because it seemed important that they would have died in an official capacity, that would surely give them something to talk about.” Wall is the only Canadian photographer whose work has cracked the $1-million mark at auction, according to
Vancouver-based Heffel Fine Art’s comprehensive database of prices paid for artwork produced in this country. Wall’s 1989 image titled The Well sold for $1.1 million at a 2008 Sotheby’s sale in London, and another titled The Forest sold for just over $1 million at a Sotheby’s sale in New York the same year.The Vancouver-born Wall, 65, was named an officer of the Order of Canada in 2007 and the next year received the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement, British Columbia’s highest award in visual arts. In the 1960s, Wall was selling freelance illustrations to the Vancouver Sun for about $20 apiece.