Looking Back and Forward at Laguna’s Pageant of the Masters
By Liz Goldner
July 27, 2024
Diehard Laguna Beach residents extol the town’s many natural and artistic attributes: great weather, charming old cottages, high-quality public art and art venues, picturesque cliffs, 1,000-foot-high canyons, and a history as a locus for early California Impressionist painters.
Pageant Backstage Makeup. Photo, Ron Azevedo.
At the heart of this quirky community is the 92-year-old Pageant of the Masters. The summer-long theatrical spectacle marries fine art with complex theatrical engineering to create a stage show of live people posing as characters in classic, modern and contemporary paintings and sculptures. The models who inhabit the “living pictures” wear elaborate make-up, wigs, headpieces and complex constructed clothing. Detailed backdrops are created by a team of professional artists. Supporting the production is a large construction crew, live orchestra and a narrator who describes the stories behind the pictures.
These two-hour tableaux vivants were originally derived from parlor games of the Victorian era. The games featured party-goers posing as their favorite art characters within large picture frames. The original 1932 Pageant, titled “Spirit of the Masters Pageant,” mimicked the parlor games with volunteers posing as “Mona Lisa,” “Whistler’s Mother,” and other iconic subjects. Those volunteers walked down Laguna Beach streets, holding their oversized frames, leading onlookers to the newly-formed Festival of Arts.
The Pageant of the Masters, renamed in 1935, evolved to become a complex, unique production, presenting life-size versions of Vermeer, Rembrandt, Breughel, da Vinci, Botticelli, Manet, and modern and contemporary paintings, all featuring real people posing as two-dimensional characters. Each Pageant includes a parade reflecting that year’s theme.
Jean-Honore Fragonard, “The Swing,” 1767.
Laguna Beach residents claim the spectacle as their own, welcoming visitors from around the country and the world. In spite of the steep ticket price [mostly between $100 and $200—Ed.], many residents attend the Pageant, bringing out-of-towners with them. While individual productions vary broadly in quality, most residents and the local press don’t normally say anything negative about a particular Pageant production — or about the town’s three summer art festivals. Laguna art lovers are like one big supportive family, which is both an attribute and a drawback.
First-time visitors to the Pageant are often startled by the production quality in the outdoor Irvine Bowl. Sitting in the dark, they are treated to sequential living pictures, each appearing for just a few minutes. Some spectators even inquire about why the Pageant is happening at all. Is it a theatrical event, an art event or just a spectacle?
Attending the Pageant production “Under the Sun” in 2018, I left enlightened about the history of art and surf music in Orange County. The living pictures of local bucolic scenes included works by local prewar art stars Rex Brandt and Joseph Kleitsch in the first act. The parade featured surfers, a sixties style surf rock band, and a young rocker gyrating in front of a replica of the Laguna Main Beach lifeguard stand. The second act included masters of European Impressionism. The 3-D rendition of Gauguin’s “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” was enhanced by narrator Richard Doyle’s talk about the struggles that the artist endured as he painted the masterpiece.
Edith Head, “Portrait of Grace Kelly,” 1955.
This year’s Pageant, "À La Mode: The Art of Fashion," includes a live fashion show, a profile of Academy Award winning fashion designer Edith Head with models donning her iconic designs, and a parade of uber-fashionably dressed attendees from the annual Met Gala in New York. Re-created works include paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, John Singer Sargent, Edouard Manet, Thomas Gainsborough, David Hockney, and a figurine by artist/designer Erté.
But there’s more to the event than just the living pictures, according to L.A. photographer and Pageant aficionado Matthew Rolston. Rolston’s photos explore the concept that art is a metaphor for life, while investigating our identity as human beings and how we define ourselves. The Pageant is a perfect event for that exploration.
Matthew Rolston, “Da Vinci, The Last Supper (Saint Philip The Curious),” 2016
Several years ago Rolston received permission to photograph, offstage, cast members all made up and dressed for the productions. He published the resulting photos in his book, “Matthew Rolston, Art People: The Pageant Portraits,” a compendium revealing the often-melancholy natures of the real people who impersonate the painted and sculpted ones. Indeed, the photo portraits go beyond the Pageant’s presentations, exploring the deeper humanity within the models/actors, including the hall-of-mirrors aspects of artmaking.
Rolston’s photo “Da Vinci, The Last Supper (Saint Philip The Curious),” depicting the character from Da Vinci’s famous mural, is a portrait of a somber-faced Pageant cast member, heavily made up, coiffed, and dressed to mimic a person from the time of Christ. Eclipsing the present, it brings viewers to a solemn scene from millennia past. The concluding living picture, a portrayal of “The Last Supper,” is a feature of every Pageant production.
Matthew Rolston, “Barye, Roger and Angelica,” 2016. Courtesy Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles.
Rolston’s “Barye, Roger and Angelica” centers on a young woman painted entirely in gold, including her draped gown and hair, with only her piercing blue eyes revealing her living identity. As a human being, segueing to become a sculptural work that inverts the Pygmalion myth, she reveals the photographer’s genius at uncovering the deeper vicissitudes in art.
Rolston also wrote for the “Art People” catalog, “Art is human. We are art.” His photos transcend many limitations to create great art, and the people posing in the Pageant photos seem to do so as well, onstage and in his portraits. Several years ago, I asked a Pageant model how she feels while posing in the living pictures. Her answer: “I feel like a work of art,” attesting to the Pageant’s inspiration for us to embrace art as a source of harmony and grace.
