CATALOGUE ESSAYS

FOREWARD

By Malcolm Warner, PhD

IN 2016, THE PAGEANT OF THE MASTERS IN LAGUNA BEACH staged a tableau vivant of David Hockney’s Portrait of Nick Wilder, showing Wilder in the pool at his Los Angeles home. Ever attentive to detail, the makeup team at the Pageant painted the face and chest of the man playing Wilder to reproduce Hockney’s brushwork and the “W” of shadow under Wilder’s chin. These appear in high definition in Matthew Rolston’s larger-than-life portrait of him. It is the photograph of a person who has been painted to look like a figure in a painting—which happens to have been based on a photograph in the first place. Rolston is fascinated by such layering of images. His deftly titled series, Art People: The Pageant Portraits, shows him delightedly representing representations of representations.

In some respects, the series takes old artistic traditions and practices into new territory. For centuries, artists have used models, chosen for their looks, to be costumed, posed and painted from. In the opening essay for this catalogue, Nigel Spivey teases out the ways in which this age-old part of the art-making process connects to the post-art artwork that is the tableau vivant. There is also the tradition of portraiture in character, in which the portrait sitter is likened, at some level, to someone else. Each of these forms of dress-up points toward Rolston’s work, but the conceit becomes more complicated—in his own words, “a kind of hall of mirrors of art reflecting art.”

In Art People, Rolston shows the performer, not the performance: the figure is removed from its context. This underlines, incidentally, the fact that the series is more than a mere documentation of the Pageant; it is a work of art in its own right, shaped by quite different artistic decisions. By isolating his subjects, and presenting them in such high definition that the painted-on brushwork and patinas reveal themselves as the makeup that they are, Rolston brings out the strange, melancholy poetry of real people impersonating painted and sculpted ones.

Life imitates art, and life shows through. It is not only the conceptual hall of mirrors that makes the Art People series so compelling but also the humanity. Rolston recognizes a debt to Richard Avedon’s In the American West, another series of portraits of subjects who seem all the more real and interesting for being non-celebrities, and the comparison reminds us that Art People is not only about art but also about people.

For suggesting the idea of exhibiting the series at Laguna Art Museum, we are grateful to gallerist Peter Blake, who first brought this body of work to our attention. Our thanks also to the Pageant’s director/producer, Diane Challis Davy; to its director of marketing, public relations and merchandising, Sharbie Higuchi; and to all our friends at the Pageant for their unstinting helpfulness.

We are much indebted to our essay contributors for their thoughtful insights into the genesis and meanings of Art People. Art historian Nigel Spivey discusses the ideas and themes that the series explores in its subject; journalist Christina Binkley provides a vivid profile of the artist and his fascination with the Pageant; and Dan Duling, the Pageant’s longtime scriptwriter, relates Rolston’s work to the history of art and photography in Laguna Beach.

Above all, we offer a heartfelt thank you to Matthew Rolston. It has been a privilege and a pleasure to work with him in bringing his “art people” back to Laguna.

MASQUERADING AS FAMOUS WORKS OF ART... At first sight this would seem, as an activity, somewhat bizarre—and rather childish or frivolous. Kids do “fancy dress”; if adults indulge themselves, it is usually for some sort of party. The same attitude might naturally extend to Laguna Beach’s Pageant of the Masters. Allow it to be an event of mere fun, an American jeu d’esprit conceived during the years of the Great Depression and surviving as a harmless seaside diversion, categorically to be judged in a realm not far from Disneyland. The tableau vivant was popular entertainment in Medieval Europe; down the centuries, comparable festivals come and go. To this day, the title of “pageant” carries overtones of ephemerality. It signifies an essentially inane spectacle: amusing while it lasts, but not to be taken seriously.

We misunderstand. The revelation of Matthew Rolston’s Art People is not only that Pageant of the Masters is itself a work of art—involving a serious commitment from protagonists and spectators of all ages —Art People advances a statement about our identity as human beings: how we define ourselves as creatures who are creative, and as individuals whose individuality is part of that creative power. So what are we creating behind this façade of sheer pageantry?

The instant answer is obvious enough, though perhaps not obviously creative. Art People portrays, with an extraordinarily close focus, the human gift for imitation. We know how to dress up, to represent, to make one thing look—or sound, feel, smell and taste—like another. This is a behavioral device characteristic of our species, as acknowledged by Aristotle over 2,000 years ago. It has far-reaching implications. Our penchant for imitation explains why we go to the theater or the cinema, and sometimes succumb to tears. It is why we look at a painted bunch of grapes and declare that they look good enough to eat; it is why the sight of a fellow human “disguised” as a marble statue arrests our attention.

Such imitation is clever, even convincing; whether it is more allusion than illusion, whether it is deception to the point of fraud or double take, our interest is naturally engaged. And we have had, as a species, thousands of years of practice. Among the earliest prehistoric artworks of humankind are pictures of other animals that can be precisely identified—because those images are so carefully imitative of reality.

What takes place at the Laguna Beach pageant both capitalizes on this characteristic biological trait and turns it around. Naturally, the tableau vivant favors figurative styles—no one has yet been challenged to stand in for a Rothko—and it is a well-known historical fact that exponents of the figurative tradition like to use models. This is their pragmatic acceptance of the imitation gift. Artists stereotypically equip themselves with sketchbooks, in readiness for some visual impression that calls out to be imitated—recreated as “present,” somehow, in two or three dimensions. But a sketchbook is not always sufficient. Faced with a commission to “re-present” an event that happened far away in time and space, the artist has little choice but to contrive a sort of stage-set. Some practitioners are able to do this in their heads—they can visualize dreams and fantasy. Most, however, resort to the real world—which can be fantastic enough.

But when we examine the features of those volunteers cast in the regular finale of the Pageant, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, it is worth asking ourselves the following question. This is the modern age, in California, but how did the artist set it up, in fifteenth-century Milan—bearing in mind that the event itself should be situated, logically, in first-century Jerusalem? With regard to the original modeling process of the picture, various anecdotes survive. Some of them are incredible—notoriously the story that a virtuous young man who originally posed as Jesus then lapsed into ways of depravity, and eventually served as the model for Judas, as well. In fact, the powerful life study that is taken to be Leonardo’s Judas prototype suggests that the artist’s priority lay in catching a reflex of alarm, rather than in making a caricature of villainy. Every apostle at the table hears the declaration “one of you will betray me”; each must respond in a particular way. So Judas, clutching the purse that contains his betrayal fee, swivels abruptly, knocking over the salt cellar. Showing the twist of his neck muscles is paramount if viewers are to understand the shock of guilt that shudders through this figure; such is the figurative artist’s commitment to making and matching—"getting it right”—by imitation. And for this commission in Renaissance Italy, there was further reason for creating a lifelike mockup of an event that took place far away and long ago. The liturgy of the Eucharist demanded as much: The Last Supper is every rite of Holy Communion, reenacted in perpetuity by the faithful. Leonardo’s picture was effectively a mural dominating the dining hall that served a community of Dominican friars. The friars looked up from their bread and wine to see an image encompassing the theological principle of perpetual remembrance. Indeed, the artist may well have called upon some of those friars to establish his composition with a sacramental tableau vivant. When the German writer Goethe visited the monastery, in the late eighteenth century, he observed that Leonardo must have coordinated his scene using what was immediately available—not only the table, but also the tablecloth, the cups and plates, the cutlery—for these items, incidental features of the picture, were still in active use.

So there were, once upon a time, models for these masterpieces; and by animating such images for the Pageant, that original aspect of creation is curiously inverted and evoked by latter-day participation. More than participation, to be precise—a sort of reincarnation. One striking aspect of how Matthew Rolston has observed the performance, however, is that in his portraits we see the participants at a remove from their official duties. They are, so to speak, “in role”—yet not as they eventually appear choreographed on the stage. A photographer who specializes in portraits will, like the figurative artist, demand of subjects a certain level of pose, and poise, if not immobility. The images of Art People could almost be counted as a form of still life—or, at least, lives stilled by a certain shutter-speed. These figures are “in character,” more or less ready to take their places in the scene, but they are offstage, detached from all scenography, in an enclave to be shared with the camera. The resultant calm of self-awareness and individual isolation is underpinned by a dense nexus of affinities among art, photography and life.

The photographic artist secures a portrait. That is a significant decision, for it is the photographer, not the subject, who chooses from a range of possibilities which image best conveys their artistic purpose. If the subject remains virtually anonymous, it is a portrait nonetheless. So we gaze, for example, at the person who will take her part in the re-creation of a large painting done by David Hockney about half a century ago: American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman). The original painting was itself a double portrait of the Weismans posing outside their Beverly Hills home. Mrs. Weisman allegedly disliked the picture, and soon got rid of it; a subsequent owner donated it to the Art Institute of Chicago, where it is now duly exhibited as an “iconic” masterpiece of the 1960s. As such, it seems an entirely appropriate choice for the Pageant, re-creating in Laguna Beach an image so evocative of contemporary California. But the proximity of art and life here is not only a matter of time and space. Rolston’s camera fixes the presence of the woman who has undertaken to play the pictorial figure of Marcia Weisman. Rolston deliberately juxtaposes his image of the volunteer-player against an image of the painted Styrofoam head used as a model for intervention by another artist: the Pageant’s makeup expert. The resultant diptych illustrates the attention to detail involved in this “dressing up,” and at the same time requires that we question our faith in surface appearance. By daily routine we rely upon face recognition for the assignment of personal identity. Exactly whose identity, however, is being presented here?

It is known that neither of the two “American collectors” posed at length for the original picture; their appearance on canvas is directly derived from certain snapshots taken by the artist. The resultant distortion —the viewpoint, in Hockney’s own phrase, “of a paralyzed Cyclops”—is particularly evident in the facial expression of Marcia Weisman. Transferred in bold acrylic paint, a half-smile caught on camera becomes more like a rictus. There is no need for us to indulge in retrospective surmise about whether Hockney intended to depict an unhappy couple heading toward imminent divorce, but we register the element of artistic choice here, and the possibility that Marcia Weisman as commemorated by this artist in 1968 bears scant resemblance to the Marcia Weisman as known to her friends and family (or even to herself). Our Laguna Beach volunteer is dressed up in a pink gown that is not, in reality, a pink gown, but a garment colored to appear like a pink gown when worn on a stone terrace in strong sunlight and rendered in Hockney’s characteristically flat brushwork. Here, then, is an art person: one of our human species, artfully transfixed during a process of artful transformation. The stillness of the image has a revelatory effect, erasing any suspicion of disguise. But a doubt remains to be settled, and it seems a very strange doubt to arise from a portrait. At this moment in time, who is this person?

As anthropologists have observed, the Western concept of a person is a curious cultural construct. Any good dictionary will indicate why. In Old Latin, derived from ancient Etruscan terminology, “persona” signified a masked figure or theatrical role—the part that an actor would take. At a certain point in the social history of Rome, this sense shifted. “Persona” came to denote the moral status or “character” of an individual citizen—a “person” in the eyes of the law. In subsequent Christian thinking, personal responsibility necessarily entailed personal consciousness. Thereafter, it seemed natural enough for philosophers, then psychologists, to develop the concept of the singular autonomous “self” as a scientific entity.

No wonder we are left wondering who on earth we are. What started as external role-play has become some sort of quest for a core internal truth—the “real me,” which can seem very elusive. Are we determined by chance or choice? Does each of us, in the poet Whitman’s well-known words, “contain multitudes”? It may comfort us, then, to know that this dilemma is not universally typical of human societies. Among First Peoples of continental America, among preindustrial tribes of Melanesia, it is well documented that names tended to be assigned according to particular social roles, not individual identity. Describing such societies, the very term “individual” has been called into question; it seems more fitting to speak of “dividuals”—people who are capable of dividing into roles within a group. And how will those roles be designated? We might have guessed: by special costumes, face and body paint, masks and headgear. In other words, by dressing up.

Art People is not an anthropological project. Yet it is about being human, and the imaginative fascination with how humans express their capacity for not only being but also becoming. While Pageant of the Masters is a spectacular seasonal show, it reflects what we are all doing, all the time: dreaming of possible scenarios; theoretically projecting ourselves into this role or that; using our imaginations to pursue the multiple goals and objectives, great and small, that we conceive of on a daily basis. One function of art is to assist in such wishful thinking. Another is to fix the transient. Those twin elements combine in the sense of our mortal self-awareness. Ultimately, that is why Art People is such an absorbing assemblage.

ESSAY TWO

WOMEN IN GOLD

By Christina Binkley

WHEN I FIRST LAID EYES ON MATTHEW ROLSTON, he was seated at a table at the JF Chen gallery in Los Angeles looking bookish in a gray tailored suit jacket and a crisply starched white button-down shirt, which is not the typical profile for a famous celebrity photographer. Rolston was surrounded by large-scale prints of his first self-commissioned fine art endeavor, a series of five-foot-by-five-foot portraits of ventriloquist dummies that he had discovered in a tiny museum in Kentucky and subsequently photographed, giving each old wooden doll the same treatment he gave Madonna and Angelina Jolie and Isabella Rossellini and David Bowie and the hundreds of other stars Rolston has spent his career shooting for Interview and Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue and Rolling Stone. It was 2013.

Rolston was signing copies of a gorgeously printed art book of those photographs of dummies, Talking Heads: The Vent Haven Portraits. The gallery event had been hosted by actress Diane Keaton and art collector Kay Saatchi. Keaton has an eye for intriguing photography and had been so taken with Rolston’s photographs that she enlisted in the effort to publicize them. Likewise, Saatchi recognized the extraordinary nature of Rolston’s shift into contemporary art. I’ve forgotten why I attended, but I know why I stayed: Rolston’s portraits sparked life in those musty dummies, turning their wooden forms into individuals we’ve all known—uncles, colleagues, vagabonds, store clerks. They were mesmerizing, a little frightening, and the hand that had shot them took portraiture to another level.

The humanity that Rolston wrought from glass eyeballs and plaster flesh fell just this side of the concept known as the “uncanny valley”—the idea of taking fakery so close to reality that it makes the viewer squirm. As we chatted, he discussed the uncanny valley with obvious delight, I believe, because he knew that his mastery enabled him to keep the viewer right on its edge without tumbling in.

Light and shadow are the obvious tools of a photographer, but Rolston wielded them with heightened precision and exaggeration. Until I met him, I believed that photographs told the truth starkly and inarguably. Rolston showed me that photography can lie, cheat and steal, but it can also elicit humanity from an inanimate object, and sometimes it can pierce the façade to reveal some message that is in the intent of the photographer. Later he would demonstrate that he could find glamour even in mummified bodies. It’s hard to creep out Matthew Rolston.

Art People is the third of Rolston’s personal fine art projects—part of a body of work he began to pursue in mid-career. It is also the result of remarkable tenacity.

Rolston first encountered Pageant of the Masters in 1963 when his father, a Los Angeles attorney, bundled the family—mom and five kids!—off to Laguna Beach to see the tableau vivant performance. The family made a habit of visiting local cultural attractions like the Huntington Library in Pasadena, whose collections could serve as a guidebook to Rolston’s subsequent creations. “Goddess imagery has haunted my work,” he says, referring to the Huntington’s gallery rooms filled with lush portraits of eighteenth-century British beauties. Thomas Lawrence’s renowned portrait Pinkie hung directly opposite Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy. “That made quite the impression,” Rolston says with a laugh. They are the DNA in so many of his portraits. “If I walked you through the Huntington Library, you’d understand a great deal about my work. It’s a very important place to me.”

At age eight, Rolston saw his first ballet, Swan Lake, and he recalls all “the goddess-like qualities of the Swan Princess and her court of cygnets.” At the same time, he says, his favorite bedtime storybook was Homebodies, a collection of Charles Addams’ cartoons from The New Yorker, which had macabre but glamorous characters like Gomez and Morticia Addams. So even in elementary school, Rolston loved the combination of black humor and glamour. You can see all that in his work.

In Laguna Beach (where the Pageant has been held each summer since 1933), young Rolston watched volunteer cast members and professional theatrical designers re-create famous artworks, each positioned for a minute or two. A seed was planted. Perhaps it was the slightly twisted nature of tableau vivant—using reality to create fakes, lies to reveal truths, that appealed to him.

After three or four summers visiting the Pageant as a child, Rolston later enjoyed a rather fabulous career in photography, much of it spent pursuing visions that obsessed him growing up. Visiting his grandfather’s Beverly Hills medical office was another inspiration. Back in the 1940s, Dr. Arthur Hoffman had been chief of staff at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital—he went on to an illustrious private practice treating many Hollywood stars. The doctor’s private office remained furnished in the style of the ’40s, all limed oak and leather, and throughout Rolston’s childhood, was still decorated with oversized MGM gallery prints of the studio’s stars he had treated, sepia toned and held in crystal Art Deco frames (all lavishly inscribed to Dr. Hoffman, of course). If you envision studio publicity photos of Joan Crawford in the 1930s and ’40s, rendered with poreless alabaster skin, you will see a direct path to Rolston’s later work bathing stars like Madonna and Cyndi Lauper in romantic fantasy light. No star in front of Rolston’s camera ever had less than flawless skin.

Rolston moved quickly into the fast lane. He studied the work of photographers George Hurrell and Richard Avedon. He left ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena when Andy Warhol “discovered” him, and he spent the next several decades creating portraits of movie stars and shooting commercial projects that anyone alive will recall, whether or not they knew the name of the photographer. In his commercial and editorial commissions, he worked from mood boards and storyboards as he prepared meticulously for his shoots, sending assistants off to find props to capture the concepts he had planned.

Glancing through his work from those decades, it’s possible to spot his references, intentional or otherwise—for instance, Kirsten Dunst evoking Jean Harlow as photographed by George Hurrell in 1933, or Beyoncé Knowles all in gold like a Gustav Klimt woman. He even once photographed the actress Goldie Hawn, nude, painted gold from head to toe, for a magazine editorial entitled “Solid Goldie.” Golden people, in fact, come up again and again in Rolston’s work, and they show up in Art People, as well. Also, Richard Avedon. Richard Avedon. Richard Avedon.

Rolston as a child was captivated with the images in his mother’s Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue magazines, where he first encountered Avedon’s photography. He absorbed a good deal from observing the progression of Avedon’s work over the years. He looked at photos such as Avedon’s iconic 1953 portrait of the Italian princess Marella Agnelli, and from that (and other Avedon images) learned that “true elegance is restraint. It’s a reduction.” He also learned—looking at Avedon’s non-glamour photos, such as one of a coal miner named James Story from Avedon’s series In the American West, 1979-1984 —“that beauty and the grotesque are closely intertwined. Conceptual contradictions mixed with high style, that’s what attracts me the most,” explains Rolston. It was serendipity that in his very first semester at ArtCenter, the college mounted Avedon’s 1975 exhibition Portraits, and the artist himself spent a week installing the show and visiting with students and faculty. “Can you imagine that?” Rolston says. “My childhood hero!”

In revering Avedon, Rolston began to study the work of pioneering fashion editor Carmel Snow, the too-oft forgotten editor of Harper’s Bazaar in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. The gutsy and innovative Snow, along with groundbreaking art director Alexey Brodovitch, virtually invented the look and feel of fashionable magazines as we know them today. Snow gave influential editor Diana Vreeland her first job and is also credited with discovering Avedon, Brodovitch, and the photographer Irving Penn, among many others.

Rolston sees her ghost in the spirit of fashion today, as well as in his own work, almost always seeking to juxtapose the elegant with the jarring.

Eventually, even the master must challenge himself with something new. Rolston, like Avedon, moved away from pure glamour work, taking inspiration from the grotesque, which can also be quite gorgeous, he found. Equally inspired by works of Avedon’s contemporaries, such as Penn’s 1971 Man with Pink Face, in which a New Guinea highlander’s ritual face paint is crumbling and raw, Rolston noted, “I’ve spent a lot of time studying idealized beauty. The grotesque is actually the same territory—you just have to look at it from both sides.”

In 2005, Rolston was reintroduced to Pageant of the Masters when the actress Teri Hatcher served as the host of its annual Celebrity Benefit, a red carpet one-night affair held every season in support of arts education, programming and facility development. He had been working with Hatcher on promotions for the television show Desperate Housewives, and she invited him to come to the event as her special guest. There, he met the Pageant’s public relations director, Sharbie Higuchi.

Another eight years passed, though, before Rolston found himself discussing his fascination with the Pageant over dinner with friends. He was wrapping up his Talking Heads project, and it struck him that the Laguna pageant had something to say about an idea that was dogging him. Humans have a unique relationship with art. Humans are the only beings on earth who make art (as far as we know). But why do we do it?

Rolston sent off a letter to the Festival of Arts’ board of directors explaining that he would like to photograph the cast of the Pageant, fully costumed and made up. He went again to the Pageant, taking along a pair of high-powered binoculars through which he peered at the painted faces and bodies and backdrops of the artworks that were re-created on stage. “I saw them up close and it was utterly fascinating to me,” he says. “It was an ‘aha’ moment. I realized I’d found the prefect subject for my inquiry into art-making.” The board was cautious about revealing the magic behind the performances; they performed due diligence on Rolston and his ideas while he awaited their decision for over a year.

In the spring of 2015, Rolston mentioned the Pageant to me. We had stayed in touch after Talking Heads, and his description made me curious about this pageant that so fascinated him. I proposed doing a story for The Wall Street Journal, where I was then a staff writer. Rolston would shoot the still photographs and an accompanying video. The newspaper’s photo editors were thrilled.

“That was pretty funny because I don’t know how to do documentary photography. That’s not what I do. I’m terrible at it,” Rolston told me later. It is possibly fortunate that he didn’t mention that at the time. For Rolston, this was a fact-finding mission that would allow him backstage and give him the opportunity to meet the Pageant’s creative team. So the newspaper got Matthew Rolston’s work at a newspaper’s day rate, which was quite a coup. What I largely recall is fielding confused phone calls from Pageant staff who were perplexed at Rolston’s elaborate equipment plans and setup. They were a little far-fetched for a newspaper photographer.

One of the great pleasures of Pageant of the Masters is in witnessing the moment when a group of costumed and painted volunteers take their places in a theatrical set that has been designed to imitate a famous work of art. The lights shift, the players freeze into position—with the aid of metal braces, seats and stirrups—and the scene is wondrously transformed for ninety seconds or so. Seen up close behind scenes, the the sets and makeup that accomplish this appear bizarre. Tiny brushstrokes on a five-foot-by-seven-foot painting must be enlarged to several inches wide for the stage. Despite what he says, Rolston made quite a good documentary photographer, and his video was magnificent.

For the next year, Rolston pursued the Pageant like an undaunted lover. He drove periodically from his studio in Beverly Hills to Laguna Beach to meet for lunches with Higuchi and Pageant director Diane Challis Davy. Rolston finally received a green light to set up a makeshift studio in the staging areas behind the scenes. He would shoot portraits of the cast during dress rehearsals, intermissions and after the performances. It took three months to negotiate the details: no performers under the age of eighteen could be involved, and no nudity. Shoots would take place at times and locations where no light could leak to distract the audience. He shot roughly one hundred fifty portraits, spending five to fifteen minutes with each subject, which is very speedy work.

What was he looking for? The reader will have to guess. But there’s a gold girl in there who harkens back to Klimt’s famous Woman in Gold. And the influence of American artist John Currin, whose paintings take fascinating liberties with bodily proportions, can be seen in the way Rolston subtly elongated the neck and arms (here perhaps equally influenced by Avedon’s Marella Agnelli) and enlarged the hands of a Pageant model who posed as Eve in the Pageant’s reproduction of a painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens called The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man. “These are not documentary photographs,” Rolston says. He sought to make a point about her power. “The way she’s holding that apple, it almost looks like a weapon. My Eve is one mother of mankind”.

It’s true. The human model of another Pageant reproduction, a sculpture by Antoine-Louis Barye called Roger and Angelica Mounted on the Hippogriff, is elegant and innocent and there’s pathos in her eyes, but fortunately, she is by no means perfect. She is glorious in her humanity, even in her inhuman role.

Rolston calls Art People a “patient project.” Five years in the making, or nearly a lifetime whichever way you view it. Unlike his commercial projects, which take place over a matter of mad-rush days, Rolston doesn’t use storyboards for his fine art projects and no longer has to consider his work a contracted “deliverable” for his clients. He funds these personal projects himself, for the pleasure of his own pursuits. He works instinctively, doing careful research and preparation. For Art People, as he explored the meaning of art to human beings, his readings included The Origins of Creativity, by Edward O. Wilson; Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari; and How Art Made the World, by Nigel Spivey.

After a career showing us the light side—beauty as artifice—Rolston has now devoted himself to revealing other dimensions of beauty, those that fall on its dark side: the beauty of the grotesque. Crumbling makeup, sagging skin, the etchings of wrinkles, the unfinished edge of a costume, the brightness of the eyes shining through—they are all a means for him, and us, to explore what art is and why we pursue it.

“I feel that art-making is one of the things that makes us most human,” Rolston says. “It starts with our awareness of self. We know we’re alive and we know we’re going to die. We can’t change that. And we have this idea of perfection, but we can’t achieve it. Art is a way of explaining ourselves to ourselves. Art is imagined. Money is imagined. Movie stars are imagined. Even goddesses are imagined.”

ESSAY THREE

THE THEATER OF ART

By Dan Duling, PhD

NIGHT IN LAGUNA BEACH. House lights fade in the Irvine Bowl just six blocks from the ocean. A live orchestra begins an original overture. Welcome to an evening of theatrical magic, live storytelling and music unlike anything you’ve seen before: art that lives and breathes.

Outdoors under the stars, curtains will open, turntables will turn and tableaux vivants—“living pictures”—will appear: paintings and sculptures re-created life size. The human figures depicted are, in fact, real people costumed and made up to resemble—actually, to inhabit—their artistic doppelgängers. You’ll see these are real people when set changes are performed with the curtain open. And yet, when the lighting completes these illusions, your eyes will question what you’ve just seen. Contemplation and anticipation are fundamental to this entertainment.

Produced by the Festival of Arts of Laguna Beach, Pageant of the Masters is a celebration of art— theater both rarified and elemental. As a live narrator encourages you to experience well-known artworks with fresh eyes, the musical score draws you into stories of people who may or may not have been artists: their lives, their struggles, their humanity. This is performed with deceptive ease, outdoors, at night. It’s ephemeral, a reminder of our own temporary status. A sudden shift in lighting and music can make the heart race. You look, then look again. A slow fade to black can break your heart.

Tableau vivant is little more than a footnote in theater history. But, in Pageant of the Masters, it possesses an uncanny ability to awaken audiences to the beauty in the life and art all around us.

In the early years of the twentieth century, artists “discovered” Laguna Beach and spread the word about its relative isolation and proximity to stunning ocean views, rocky cliffs and canyon vistas. Still, it was far off the beaten path, and its limited amenities made the choice to set up a studio there an adventurous one.

One of the first painters of rank to settle in Laguna, sometime around 1912, was Frank Cuprien. A founder of the Laguna Beach Art Association, Cuprien came to symbolize “Old Laguna.” By 1917, some thirty to forty resident artists were established, including plein air painter William Wendt and his wife, sculptor Julia Bracken Wendt.

In a letter sent in 1898 to friend and fellow artist William Griffith, Wendt wrote: “Here the heart of man becomes impressionable. Here, away from conflicting creeds and sects, away from the soul-destroying hurly-burly of life, it feels that the world is beautiful; that man is his brother...” That sense of spiritual refuge was a large part of the appeal of Laguna to the artists who made their way there.

In 1918, Laguna’s artists set out to create a local gallery where they might exhibit their works. Under the leadership of American painter Edgar Payne, they held an inaugural exhibition in a makeshift gallery. Encouraged, the artists formed the Laguna Beach Art Association with Payne as its first president. When fundraising began for what is today the Laguna Art Museum, artist and teacher Anna A. Hills, the association’s first vice president, spearheaded the drive, declaring: “With such a future before us, our artist colony should grow in numbers, enthusiasm and whole-hearted cooperation, and so make for itself and Laguna an even larger place in the world of art.”
In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, Laguna artist John Hinchman had the idea of staging a celebration of the arts, which became known as “Festival of Arts.” All manner of local entertainments were concocted to inspire visitors to seek out artists’ studios and acquire art. The second Festival of Arts, in 1933, featured a line of townsfolk costumed and made up as famous artworks parading down Coast Boulevard to the Festival, where “The Spirit of the Masters Pageant” was presented. People sat in front of a set not much larger than a phone booth with a curtain. The following year, Festival of Arts was incorporated, with plans to make their summer event an annual tradition; local builder Roy Ropp and his wife, Marie, told the Festival board that the “living pictures” were an embarrassment and offered to help.

In 1935, the Ropps created the template for all Pageants to come: “living pictures” presented with backdrops painted by Roy, on a real stage built by Roy, with live narration written by Marie, and live music selected by Marie. They cast volunteer performers, their neighbors and relations. In 1936, a longer pageant was planned, including Leonardo’s The Last Supper as the finale. At its first presentation, a hush fell over the crowd as the curtain slowly closed. Then after a moment, applause erupted, and by the end of that year’s Festival, word was spreading around the country about the Pageant’s triumph. The Ropps expanded their ambitions, extra Festival days were added to accommodate more Pageant performances, and a homegrown phenomenon began its evolution. In today’s parlance, the Pageant had become a thing. Except this “thing” was destined to survive and thrive, exceeding all expectations.

Still, it wasn’t until 1941 when the land where the Festival and Pageant still reside was acquired that the Pageant’s future seemed secure. Even going dark during World War II couldn’t kill it.

Flash forward to 1964: Don Williamson took over as Pageant director. Since Williamson’s tenure (1964-1978), there have been only two other directors to date: Glen Eytchison (1979-1995) and Diane Challis Davy (1996-present). All three brought innovative stagecraft, professional polish and creative adventurousness to their productions. Today, the paid production department directors are top professionals in their fields. And, amazingly, the Pageant still benefits from over four hundred volunteer performers who fill two casts and provide monumental support behind the scenes. The one concession to tradition, with only a couple of theme-related exceptions, has been Leonardo’s The Last Supper as the program’s finale.

Director Challis Davy’s tenure has been dedicated from its outset to breathing dramatic life into a production that seems more revolutionary every year. Through it all, the Pageant’s primary agenda is its subtext that art is inclusive and that we are better for the presence of art in our lives.

The tradition of tableaux vivants dates back to the medieval and Renaissance miracle and mystery plays. “Living pictures” also became popular rites performed to welcome visiting royalty. Even Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci created spectacular court and public entertainments that included elements of tableaux vivants. Roy Ropp liked to cite Madame de Genlis, an eighteenth-century Frenchwoman who utilized tableaux vivants as entertainments at the court of the king. The earliest theatrical tableau on record to represent the appearance of a painting is said to have been presented in Paris in 1761 during the Comédie-Italienne production of Les Noces d’Arlequin.

During the nineteenth century, tableaux vivants began to evolve in two distinct directions. They were staged not only in big halls and at public events, but also, increasingly, in home parlors. In Goethe’s 1809 novel Elective Affinities, the author was inspired by the beautiful Emma, Lady Hamilton. Her representations —which she referred to as “Attitudes”—were directly inspired by the figures in Pompeiian frescoes. In Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth, the author wrote of tableaux vivants: “...to the responsive fancy they may give magic glimpses of the boundary world between fact and imagination.”

Their introduction into New York seems to have occurred during the theater season of 1831-32. “Beginning on 1 September 1831, Mrs. Barrymore appeared in ‘Tableaux Vivans’ [sic], the earliest instance of tableaux advertised by a New York theater,” as noted by Jack W. McCullough in his 1981 book Living Pictures on the New York Stage, but by 1848, the proprietors of five New York amusement halls were served with bench warrants enjoining them to cease the “immoral” presentations occurring in their establishments. To put it simply, tableaux vivants were providing opportunistic theater and burlesque producers with a clever excuse for presenting female nudity, cloaked in little more than their pretense as participants in “art.”

Later, in Laguna Beach, former vaudevillian Lolita Perine, familiar with both the proper and the prurient possibilities of this static art, staged Laguna’s first “living picture”—Whistler’s Mother—in 1920 at a friend’s home as part of a fundraiser.

When Matthew Rolston began studying image-making in Los Angeles, he became aware of two very different camps of photography in California’s history. To the north had been the proponents of Group ⨍.64. Chief among them were Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham. Essentially, these brilliant "ascetics” believed their art could best achieve expressive truth through a kind of Spartan objectivity: the province of the artist’s eye, patience, rigor and creativity, and knowing how and when to take the shot. Staging was intentionally minimal, focused on natural environments and available light, requiring challenging expeditions into the rugged wilderness of California. Their cumulative achievements were undeniable. Ansel Adams’ 1927 masterpiece Monolith, The Face of Half Dome remains one of the most iconic photographic images ever created.

By contrast, Southern California’s early photography was often dismissed as corrupted by proximity to the worlds of advertising and Hollywood’s “dream factory.” Group ⨍.64 considered this the realm of Athenian “aesthetes,” so-called “pictorialists” hopelessly addicted to artifice, theatricality, and the comfort and control of working in a studio. The challenges inherent in their artistic expeditions were into the interior worlds of imagination and fantasy. The three most notorious of these photographic aesthetes, George Hurrell, Paul Outerbridge and William Mortensen (whom Ansel Adams once infamously referred to as photography’s “anti-Christ”), were all linked to Laguna Beach, each in their own way.

In 1924, Hurrell met Edgar Payne in Chicago. The following spring, Hurrell accompanied the Paynes back to California. After a short time in Los Angeles, Hurrell moved to Laguna Beach, where he became part of the art community and began photographing his artist neighbors. It was also in Laguna Beach that Hurrell met his patron, Florence “Pancho” Barnes, who, in turn, introduced him to silent movie star Ramon Novarro. Hurrell quickly caught the attention of Hollywood, and he moved north in 1927. By 1930, he was the head of the MGM portrait gallery and would soon become a Hollywood legend.

In 1931, another photographer set up his studio in Laguna Beach. William Mortensen began a lengthy association with both the exhibitions of the Festival of Arts and its Pageant of the Masters, while opening the William Mortensen School of Photography. An iconoclastic pictorialist (and some would say romanticist) with a penchant for grotesque and florid subject matter, he established a style of photography all his own.

Mortensen and Hurrell were instrumental in making the case for photography’s inclusion in the Festival of Arts. Later, during the 1950s, the presence of Outerbridge, an early master of the art of color commercial photography, would reinforce the art colony’s reputation as a bastion of pictorialism nurtured by the cross-pollination of commercial, glamour and celebrity photography. Laguna’s photographic aesthetes had found a place where they could experiment, teach and work.

From its inception, the Laguna Art Museum has been devoted to exhibiting works created by California artists and artworks about California. In 1981, the museum mounted a retrospective of Outerbridge’s work, and did the same for Hurrell in 2013, helping to secure their places in the canon of California photography.

Decades later, all three of these iconoclastic artists are acclaimed for their individuality and originality. Outerbridge could not have anticipated that his 1938 toilet paper advertisement would be embraced as an artistic triumph. Collectors covet Hurrell’s Hollywood portraits. And in recent years, reappraisals of Mortensen’s influential and wholly original work have restored his place in the history of Southern California photographic art.

Matthew Rolston’s quest for expressive truth is closely aligned with the bold theatricality of Hurrell, Outerbridge and Mortensen. Since the 1980s, Rolston, while reveling in the stylized play of celebrity image-making, has believed that the essence of his art is in the use of theatricality to evoke the human condition.

Rolston’s luminous Art People portraits encourage viewers to consider the creative sleight of hand—and humanity—at the heart of the Pageant. He explores the compulsion to make art, even as he suggests the answer might be that we all yearn to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

Rolston’s Art People is the product of an extended series of photo shoots backstage during the 2016 Pageant. Most of these photographs were shot following performances, and those cast members who volunteered willingly spent extra hours in costumes and makeup. Many Pageant staff also stayed late.

The resulting photographs are, quite simply, stunning. Rolston’s portraits are both beautiful and uncanny, the faces of the cast members—hidden beneath makeup suggesting painted canvas, patinated bronze, silver, gold and other artistic mediums —gaze out at the viewer, their eyes all the more revealing in their illusory raiment.

Seen outside the context of the Pageant’s stage presentation, these images create a perfect double-vision that complements Rolston’s personal aesthetic and desire to find humanity in unlikely places, something he’s already explored in photographs of ventriloquist dummies and mummified corpses.

Ekphrasis is an evocative aesthetic term for writing about tableaux vivants. It contemplates the tension between how one describes something and the thing itself, and in its simplest definition, refers to the representation of a representation. Thus, a tableau of a painting of a subject is itself ekphrastic. It can be seen as a representation of a representation. And if one were to photograph that tableau, one could consider the layers of reality and illusion within a representation of a representation of a representation. With the evolution of photographic art and digital reproduction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, tableau vivant is experiencing a new wave of critical and artistic investigation into the potential resonances of their “forced perspective.”

Matthew Rolston has spoken and written eloquently about how in many ways the double-vision oftableau vivant reveals both artistic intention and personal identity within the original artworks, and he has never lost his fascination with the Pageant’s ability to cast a spell. Nor has he lost his love of representations of representations of representations. Art People is one of his most compelling and beautiful forays into the humanity revealed beneath the mask of artifice.

AFTERWORD

By Matthew Rolston

GODS AND MONSTERS, PAINTINGS, SCULPTURE, TOMB FIGURES—even the occasional art collector— these are the subjects one is greeted by on the stage of the Festival of Arts’ long-running Pageant of the Masters, all performed by actual people portraying works of art.

“Art people” is a moniker often applied to members of the contemporary art world, a loosely organized international community—a glamorous and global crowd—of art fair-attending collectors, artists, curators and of course, the all-important gallerists.

Art People: The Pageant Portraits is something very different. These Art People are not those art people. This project is an expressive record, through photographic portraiture, of the volunteers who allowed themselves to be painted and costumed as living works of art in the Pageant‘s 2016 production. Why would anyone spend an entire summer of their lives volunteering to become the living embodiment of paintings, sculptures and other forms of graphic art? This is not easily answered, and poses yet another question: Why do we make art in the first place? The creation of art is a deeply human practice. It speaks to not only the intellectual and spiritual side of humanity, but also more primitive drives. No other species on the planet practices such an activity. It is a defining behavior of our kind.

Art People focuses on a subject I’ve long admired. I began attending the Pageant with my family as a young child. My exposure to the theatricality and magic of that stage served as one of the formative experiences of my life, helping to create the ambitions that have fueled my career. Although nurtured by California’s illustrious photographic history, as exemplified by Northern California masters such as Weston and Adams, it is perhaps no surprise to those familiar with my work that I have personally identified more strongly with the early photographic traditions of Southern California, especially the works of Hurrell, Outerbridge and Mortensen.

For the past twenty-five years, the Pageant has been directed by Diane Challis Davy, and for forty years, its scriptwriter has been Dan Duling, with the two collaborating closely on its conception. The Pageant’s technical director is Richard Hill; its public relations director is Sharbie Higuchi. The Festival of Arts is advised by its board of directors, currently led by president David Perry. The makeup for the 2016 Pageant was created by Allyson Doherty, assisted by a team of supervisors and volunteers. Costumes and headpieces were designed by Reagan Foy and painted by Sharon Lamberg and Michelle Scrimpsher; headpieces were sculpted by Liz Alvarez; and volunteer actors were cast by Nancy Martin. I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation to these brilliant leaders, creators and performers (volunteers and professionals alike) for their contributions to Art People, without whom this project could not have been realized, and I would further like to thank Pageant production assistant Paul Goldie and master electrician C.W. Keller for their support. To Malcolm Warner, executive director of the Laguna Art Museum, I offer my warmest gratitude for welcoming my work into such a storied institution.

More than a record of the Pageant of the Masters’ costumes, makeup designs and intricate staging motifs, Art People is a series of portraits of human beings. It attempts to portray their personal dignity, their inner life and conflicts, all within a fascinating conceit that centers on the somewhat mysterious subject of the making and appreciation of art. Art is human. We are art.

CONTRIBUTORS

EDITOR

MALCOLM WARNER, former Executive Director of Laguna Art Museum, served from 2012 through 2020. Previously, Warner was Deputy Director at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; and Curator of European Art at the San Diego Museum of Art. Warner was born in Aldershot (UK) and pursued both undergraduate and graduate studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He received his Ph.D. from the Courtauld in 1985. His doctoral dissertation was on the British Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. He remains the leading authority on Millais and, as a long-term project, is preparing a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s works.

ESSAY WRITERS

NIGEL JONATHAN SPIVEY is a British classicist and academic, specializing in classical art and archaeology. He is a senior lecturer in classics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Emmanuel College. He has written extensively on the Etruscans and on the Olympic Games. Spivey has presented various television series, including How Art Made the World (BBC, 2005) and Digging for Jesus (ITV, 2005) and has also authored eight publications on the subject of art history, including Etruscan Art (1997), Greek Art and Ideas (1997), Enduring Creation: Art, Pain, and Fortitude (2001), Songs on Bronze: The Greek Myths Made Real (2005) and How Art Made the World (2006).

CHRISTINA BINKLEY is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, author and commentator on the worlds of fashion, art, and culture, and is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and WSJ Magazine. Binkley is currently writing a book about the fashion business. Author of the New York Times bestseller Winner Takes All and a recipient of the 2002 American Society of Newspaper Editors' Jesse Laventhol Prize for Deadline News Reporting, Binkley is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and resides in Los Angeles.

DAN DULING has worked in theatre his entire professional life, as an actor, director and an award-winning playwright. As a journalist, he has written about theatre, film and television. He moved to Los Angeles after completing his PhD in Drama (Playwriting and Criticism) at the University of Texas. Since 1981, he has researched and written about art as the scriptwriter for Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach, California.