(The only other cancellation in its history was a four-year hiatus during World War II.) As with previous seasons, it's being held outdoors at a theater located on the Festival of Arts grounds. This year’s event is particularly special considering the 2020 pageant and festival were both canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. More recently, in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles challenged people to recreate famous works using clothing and props they had on hand in quarantine.īackstage makeup for One Man Caravan (Family on the Road) by Dorothea Lange (1938)įast forward to today, and the pageant's 86th season is underway, as part of the Festival of Arts of Laguna Beach, an eight-week art extravaganza that includes a juried art show, guided art tours, workshops, live music and more.

By the mid-1800s, the practice crossed the Atlantic to the United States, where it become a popular fad. The live recreations featured “figures posed, silent and immobile, for 20 or 30 seconds in imitation of well-known works of art,” according to The Chicago School of Media Theory. In Victorian England, these performances served as entertaining parlor games. Living pictures evolved from Ancient Greek mythology and miming, and were common liturgical and ceremonial events at the end of a mass during that time.

The tradition of creating tableaux vivant dates back long before the pageant, with historians tracing it to medieval times. The only difference is that an actress dressed in full costume, replete with a lace kerchief on top of her head, stood in for his mother, Anna McNeill Whistler. It proved so successful that the following year organizers added “living pictures” to the lineup, featuring real-life replicas of a number of famous works, including James McNeill Whistler’s 1871 oil painting titled Whistler’s Mother. Hinchman produced a summer festival for art enthusiasts who also happened to be in nearby Los Angeles for the Olympic Games. The Pageant of the Masters dates back to 1932, when local artist John H. This trick of the eye has been drawing crowds from across California and around the world for nearly a century. A blink of an eye or a subtle shift in posture and suddenly audience members are well aware that what they’re looking at is a collection of tableaux vivant, or “living pictures,” and the characters in each piece are real people.

On closer inspection though, it becomes evident that each masterpiece is an illusion. The large-scale pieces of art displayed on stage at the Pageant of the Masters, a nightly summer performance in Laguna Beach, California, look as though they could’ve been plucked off the walls of some of the world’s most celebrated museums and art galleries.

Slave Pageant Game