The photographer Jeff Wall dreams up cool, impersonal, narrative tableaux, prints them as transparencies, and mounts them in electric light boxes. Often between 8 and 14 feet wide, the glowing pictures are of landscapes, cityscapes, or interiors. The photographs generally include figures, whether hired actors or passers-by, and are documentary, staged, digitally manipulated, or a combination of the three. At times the images relate to Old Master or 19th-century paintings or to Modernist photographs and films. Or they resemble scenes of contemporary life enlarged to mural scale.

All of this gives the pictures familiarity. But, philosophically or theoretically entrenched, Mr. Wall’s photographs are also shrewd commentaries on art and Modernity, which keeps his pictures and their sources at a controlled, conceptual distance. A combination of surreal billboards, idyllic landscapes, and absurd theater, they bridge the worlds of art, commodity, and life.

A retrospective comprising 40 of Mr. Wall’s photographs from between 1978 and 2006 has been mounted at the Museum of Modern Art. The show, which will travel on to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, was co-curated by Peter Galassi at MoMA, and Neal Benezra at SFMoMA. The exhibit, like the photographs, is as clinically dazzling as an operating room. Encased in cold metal frames, the pictures, lit from within, are full of stark details, and their colors project into the galleries as velvety light. The photographs are slick and methodical productions of Mr. Walls’s wide-ranging vision, which — though it can swing from poetic to academic to melodramatic to sophomoric — is always vividly calculated and presented.

Mr. Wall (b. 1946) is an art historian who lives and works in his native Vancouver, British Columbia. He has written extensively on Minimalism, Conceptual art, and photography (a book of his essays and interviews has just been published by Mo-MA). But as an artist he is largely selftaught.

Some of his landscape photographs, such as “The Old Prison” (1987), a long, horizontal, pearly-violet view of a bay, and “Coastal Motifs” (1989), of a coastline at the foot of a mountain range, are striking and beautiful. The combinations of their natural and artificial light, where colors are heightened, create a kind of blinding, iridescent magic. And his large gelatin silver print “Night” (2001), a black-and-white image of homeless figures next to a pool of water (one of only four in the show that are not lit), provides an enveloping, buoyant darkness.

But many of his photographs can feel driven first and foremost not by aesthetic concerns but by contemporary art historical babble, and they can devolve into theoretical diatribes that, though initially eye-catching — usually because of their scale and light — quickly become tiresome.

This is especially true of Mr. Wall’s earliest works, such as “The Destroyed Room” (1978), a claustrophobic mess of a room, based on Eugène Delacroix’s masterpiece “The Death of Sardanapalus” (1827); and “Picture for Women” (1979), an image of a woman and the photographer, as well as of his camera and studio, all reflected in a mirror, based on Édouard Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” (1881–82).

Both of these photographs, as well as most of Mr. Wall’s works related to paintings, hold to the belief that photography, a more recent and avant-garde medium, has not only replaced that of painting, but that photography can also update and comment upon painting in the process. This tall order isn’t the case, at least not in Mr. Wall’s hands.

Mr. Wall, based on his art and interviews, is clearly well-read, analytical, and intelligent, but there is a difference between theoretical intelligence and pictorial intelligence. His photographs generally do not move beyond comments upon or mimicry of their sources. His pictures, which can reduce figures in paintings to mere signs, do not take into account that painted forms are invented structures with poetic meanings. Human stand-ins cannot replace Delacroix’s or Titian’s figures — painted forms that may unnaturally contort, merge with the earth, and simultaneously occupy numerous places in space, specific actions designed to suggest the figures could be part landscape, part sky, and part god or goddess.

Missing in many of Mr. Wall’s images is a fusion — in which his art historical sources and contemporary critiques harmonize through pictorial means and reinvention. Usually the social or theoretical critique drowns out the image. Or Mr. Wall just doesn’t have the aesthetic muscle to pull together a great photograph, especially one that demands monumental scale. Many of the works, despite their apparent social messages about homelessness and dispossession, feminism, the role of the artist in the age of mechanical reproduction, or the horrors of war, come off as highly polished superficialities.

There are exceptions, such as his disturbing “A Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in October 1947” (1990), in which a female ventriloquist holds court with a wooden dummy, surrounded by balloons and an audience of children, some of whom are almost as creepy as the dummy itself.

Likewise, Mr. Wall’s “In Front of a Nightclub” (2006), a staged/composite picture with some two dozen figures, provides us with a mix of poignant, almost melancholic details — a sad man carrying roses; another man looking dejected, leaning against the nightclub’s gate; a discarded red cigarette box; a man eating pizza; gargoyles, and gleaming gold pumps on a bluehaired girl — that all add up to something mysterious yet commonplace.

One of the best works in the exhibit is “A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai)” (1993), an image based on Hokusai’s woodcut print “A High Wind in Yeijiri, From the Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji” (1831–33). In this large digital montage, set in an industrial landscape, four figures battle with the wind. Dozens of sheets of paper fly across the sky from out of a portfolio. A man stumbles. Another man, his coat spreading like wings, looks longingly at his fedora, which floats high in the sky like a flying saucer — a counterpoint to a flowering tree, arching in the wind.

Here, creating a sense of ur gency, futility, and plainspoken poetry, Mr. Wall achieves an au thentic transformation of the Japanese print. He moves freely beyond glibness, commentary, and conceptual irony. Against an in dustrial wasteland, the picture conveys the fleetingness and hu mor in life, as well as the unfore seeable changes that can suddenly beset us. Mr. Wall’s wind rises, and takes us along with it.

February 25 through May 14 (53 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).