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| A (digital photograph of a) tableaux vivant of a painting of a museum gallery of paintings. The living picture represents Susan Hoehn's painting LACMA (The Artist at LACMA), 2024, which depicts paintings by Lichtenstein, Hockney, and Ay-O |
Call it the Nathan Fielder method of art appreciation. Instead of looking at original paintings, assemble a crew of actors to impersonate people depicted in paintings. Have the actors pose motionless in 2D sets with flat lighting that makes their silent performance virtually indistinguishable from the real paintings. This is not an episode of The Rehearsal but the premise of Laguna Beach's Pageant of the Masters, performed each summer by residents of the artsy seaside community. Up close the tableaux vivants offer a trip to Uncanny Valley. However, for most Pageant visitors in the Irvine Bowl, the illusion is virtually seamless. It is as if they are viewing a slide projection of the artwork.
This year the Pageant is offering simulacra of art in California museums. Featured are works from the Crocker, de Young, Hearst Castle, LACMA, Getty, Norton Simon, and Timken.
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| Pageant of the Masters, 2025 press photo for living picture of Rembrandt's Abduction of Europa |
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| Rembrandt, The Abduction of Europa, 1632. J. Paul Getty Museum |
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| Pageant of the Masters, 2025 press photo for living picture of Joseph Kleitch's Red and Green |
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| Joseph Kleitsch, Red and Green, 1923. Jack & Shanaz Langson Institute & Museum of California Art, UC Irvine |
As usual the selection of artworks represented is a little odd. Only a few qualify as star pieces of their respective museums (the Norton Simon's Degas Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen and Dancers in the Wings; the Getty's Rembrandt Abduction of Europa). The selection skews toward lesser-known and conservative 19th- and 20th-century art. Witness Charles Christian Nahl's Sunday Morning in the Mines (Crocker Art Museum), Phil Dike's Afternoon at Diver's Cove (Hilbert Museum), or Roberto Bompiani's A Roman Feast (Getty Museum). The latter is a painting by the "Italian Bouguereau" that the Getty has not shown since 1993. Why a painting not deemed worthy of wall space is worthy of this insanely labor-intensive tribute is one of the mysteries of the Pageant.
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| Background painting for Boucher's Lovers in a Park |
Not every painting is suited to living-picture treatment. Multi-figure compositions with full-length figures are easiest to adapt. The background paintings—with voids and posing apparatus—can be surrealist objects in their own right. In the publicity shot above, a cross hung with bouquets rises from a severed foot. The grinning time-travelers are oblivious to the dismembered aristocrats behind them, a history painting that Boucher never imagined.
The Pageant of the Masters runs through Aug. 29 in the Irvine Bowl, Laguna Beach.
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| François Boucher, Lovers in a Park, 1758. Timken Museum, San Diego |
Comments
> the "Italian Bouguereau"
> that the Getty has not
> shown since 1993.
A pre-Raphaelite style always puzzles me. While the technical skills are evident, the creative/aesthetic ones are not. Sort of like very wealthy people living in palatial houses that aren't exactly the height of good taste..
The reverse of that are very skilled people who, on a modest budget and with limited means, do some surprisingly impressive things.
The Laguna Pageant, the Lucas Museum and Zumthor's/Govan's LACMA are like a mix of all of that, kitschy old, flaky new. Along with the idea of a "museum of contemporary art, but frankly...not a very good one."
I also do not see what the above comment about the Pre-Raphaelites has to do with the price of tea.
For 35 years, they banned me from doing math. They said Ted Gallagher with a calculator was like a child with a loaded gun.