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The Magic of Painted Bodies

MATTHEW ROLSTON’S PAGEANT OF THE MASTERS PORTRAITS ARE WONDERS ALL THEIR OWN.

By Christopher Knight

When supervillain Auric Goldfinger ordered glamorous card-shark Jill Masterson to be painted head to toe in his favorite gilded hue then deposited in James Bond’s rumpled bed in 1964’s superlative 007 movie, murder and intimidation were the aim. The paint was claimed, fictionally, to have caused the beauty’s death by skin asphyxiation. 

Painted bodies don’t have the same nefarious result at the Pageant of the Masters. Maybe that’s because makeup rather than polyurethane acrylic does the annual job at the famous Laguna Beach summer festival of tableaux vivant. For the 2016 edition, however, a gilded lady was again the victim of barbarians — this time from the epic Ludovico Ariosto poem “Orlando Furioso,” fan-favorite during the Italian Renaissance

The lovely Angelica — stripped naked, chained to a rock for the dining delight of a giant sea monster and daringly rescued by Roger, a valiant knight — was also a popular subject in 19th century France. During a floundering epoch of post-revolutionary destabilization, the French were mad for organizing guidelines drawn from history and myth. 

The Pageant chose Angelica’s florid representation from an 1840s bronze by sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye. She escapes across the sea in Roger’s protective arms, riding on the back of a galloping winged-horse held aloft by a coiling dolphin. 

Celebrity photographer Matthew Rolston, known for lush portraits of actors and musicians, took a different approach in “Art People,” his exhibition of 2016 Pageant photographs currently at the Laguna Art Museum. Cinematic melodrama and sculptural romanticism are nowhere to be seen in his picture of Barye’s maiden. 

Instead, “Art People” turns the same demanding techniques of studio work applied to publicity shots of Nicki Minaj and Zac Efron and for the pages of Rolling Stone and Vogue to anonymous Laguna locals who portray characters from paintings and sculptures. The results are agreeably weird. 

Rolston’s gilded Angelica faces forward, body turned to three-quarter view and cropped just above the knee. Every inch of exposed skin is shiny gold, except for the rims of her eyelids. So is her draped tunic and the hard, coifed cap that substitutes for soft hair, like an ice-cream cone dipped in chocolate. The blue eyes and white front teeth on a sober, unsmiling face are of course unpainted, the lone suggestions of a living, breathing human being trapped inside. 

The portrait could not be more formal. What’s oddly compelling is that the photograph undercuts any expectation of personal exposure, which is what we normally expect a portrait to accomplish. Rolston posed the model, one arm hidden behind her, with her right arm slightly bent and her hand turned to an open palm — a gesture of candidness that quietly resounds against her actual concealment. 

Here I am. Who am I? 

This is a person, identity unknown, portraying an object for a tableau presented in a theater. The show is the thing. The individual woman you’re looking it remains a cryptic cipher, encased inside layers of artistic and cultural distancing. Who she is really doesn’t matter. 

When you look at Antoine-Louis Barye’s bronze sculpture in an art museum, rarely does the mind turn to the question of who the model was working in the artist’s studio posing for Angelica in the wax or plaster form that would later be cast in enduring metal. Her life was lived, and that was that. The sculpture, which is not a portrait, lives on. 

“Art People” is a strange inversion of celebrity photography, in which we casually assume we are seeing behind the public mask of a famous performer. Rolston’s exquisitely crafted pageant pictures are all mask. Some are spectacular — especially the crowned and bearded figure of Neptune, Roman god of the sea. 

Plucked from the base of a ponderous fountain in Paris’ Place de la Concorde, he’s a cast- iron spectacle with an odd cap of gilded foam. A windswept blue beard is clamped against his face, his muscled, purplish torso streaked with brush marks. The model is buff but nowhere near as bulky as the actual laborious statue designed by German-born French architect Jacques Ignace Hittorff. He’s hardly a household name today, but Rolston’s photographic fountain god elicits double-takes. 

The Art of Matthew Rolston

By Tom Teicholz

Matthew Rolston’s exhibition “Art People: The Pageant Portraits” at the Laguna Art Museum is a show as beautiful, as mysterious, as life-affirming, and as much about human creativity and art as Pageant of the Masters itself. And in a sense, it is also a metaphor for the career and work of Matthew Rolston himself.

At several exhibition-related artist talks by Rolston that I attended recently, including one where Rolston was in conversation with Los Angeles-based journalist and editor Merle Ginsberg at the Britely Social Club at the Pendry Hotel in West Hollywood, and another at the Laguna Art Museum where author and noted culture writer Christina Binkley was his interlocutor, Rolston discussed both his career and early influences.

Rolston grew up in Los Angeles and attended pretty much every art school in the area, including Chouinard (the forerunner to CalArts), Otis, and ArtCenter in Pasadena. He became enamored of golden-age Hollywood studio portraits that he found among the memorabilia and collectors’ stores on Hollywood Boulevard. At an early age, his career was launched when he got an assignment to shoot Steven Spielberg for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine.

Rolston was fortunate in finding an early home at Interview, as fortunate as Interview was to discover Rolston. Back then, in the days when Warhol himself was very much a presence at the magazine, Interview was published as an oversize large format newsprint monthly, with cover portraits of celebrities stylized and colorized by Richard Bernstein – very much in a Warhol-esque color/block style. 

Inside were short features and longer Q&As with celebrities and other notables, done in a manner that was meant to convey an actual conversation you were eavesdropping on, rather than a 60 Minutes Mike Wallace grilling. Due to Interview’s large format, the portraits accompanying the text were also super-sized and often in black & white (a money-saving strategy that became an editorial point-of-view). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, most mainstream magazine photography was focused on a casual hyper-realism – stars in jeans and white t-shirts, or stylized “real” portraits such as Avedon’s “In the American West” series of coal miners and others that conveyed a hard-won beauty.

Interview tacked in a different direction – a post-modern return to Hollywood glamour. Rolston’s portraits were the opposite of casual: they were highly staged, with great attention to lighting, every element thought out, with specific references to classic images of stars such as Garbo or Dietrich, and no detail too small to be unimportant. 

From Interview, Rolston’s career exploded, doing work for magazines such as Rolling Stone (he’s shot more than 100 covers), Vogue, W, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times Magazine and O, the Oprah Magazine (he has shot Oprah for more than 40 magazine covers, more than any other photographer). There’s a sense of fun to many of his portraits, even a winking nod at the past.

Rolston went on to make films and music videos, including for Madonna, Jewel, Janet Jackson, Christina Aguilera, Foo Fighters, Beyoncé, Seal, and Miley Cyrus as well as advertising campaigns for brands such as Estée Lauder, L’Oréal, GAP (his Khakis Swing video is particularly memorable), Revlon, Polo Ralph Lauren and Burberry, among others. 

Having reached the summit of so many facets of his professional career, several years ago Rolston decided to embark on a series of non-commissioned art projects, series that he conceptualizes and executes at his own initiative and own cost, spending at times years on the works. 

The results are striking: there is a golden girl, who seems very much a Greek nymph come to life. Her right palm faces forward in a sign we might see in a Hindu goddess. Although her eyes are open and piercingly blue, there is something of a somnolent haze about her, like a girl who has not yet awakened to her adulthood. In contrast, Rolston’s Eve, taken from Rubens and Brueghel the Elder’s Garden of Eden, is no youthful nubile, but a mature woman whose face carries its share of sorrow and who grasps the apple at her side as if its secrets were her own. The Laguna exhibition features a selection of images including portraits of the Pageant’s traditional closing tableau, Jesus and the Apostles from Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Rolston has said this project is an exploration of: “What is art?” and “Why do we make art?”

And in photographing the corpses in the Capuchin Crypt in Palermo, Rolston is giving us a vivid demonstration that what us separates us from corpses is our ability to make art of them. What is death if not the end of our potential to create?

One can argue then, that in Rolston’s editorial and commercial work, even in his work as a creative director, the collaborative constraints imposed by his subjects or employers are an application of his creative talent, but not art.

By contrast, in photographing ventriloquist dummies, or stand-in performers in tableaux vivant, or even the staged corpses in Palermo, we can see that without Rolston’s intervention, without his creative act, they remain inanimate, imitations of art, rather than Art itself.

In this sense, the answer to the fundamental and existential questions Rolston asks in his art become simple: creating is what makes us human. Because we are human, we make art. And when we die, we cease to have the capacity to be creative. And, finally, as long as we are alive, we can appreciate Rolston’s “Art People: The Pageant Portraits” in all their beauty and mystery.

Matthew Rolston: Master of the Pageant

By Louise Salter

It's safe to say that there is nothing quite like Pageant of the Masters anywhere in the world. It’s a theatrical experience which presents famous works of art on stage as tableaux vivants. In California, in the heart of Orange County’s Laguna Beach community, where townspeople have been collaborating on these tableaux for ninety years, nearly five hundred volunteers come together, year after year and summer after summer.

The performers don hand- painted costumes and elaborate makeup to take their place on a framed proscenium and strike a pose. An orchestra plays an original score, and live narration unearths little-known facts about the works, to the delight of a spellbound audience. All this happens under the stars of the Californian great outdoors once daylight has faded and the magic hour is upon the world. On one such night in the 1960s, a young boy watched, delighting in the theatre, the illusion and the sheer glamour of transformation.

Rolston cast his formidable eye on the Pageant, and the results are glorious and singular. Removing individual performers in full makeup and costume from their painted settings, he gives new life to his Art People.

The portraits are best seen at full size, blown up so that the detail and gorgeous richness of colour can be fully appreciated. They may have been born from his past, but the portraits are very much Rolston's present, a continuation of his vivid and profound work.

The early 20th century in California found two camps of photographers duelling it out, both groundbreaking, both wanting to be the force that moved the dial for photography on the world stage.

In 1932, in Northern California, eleven photographers formed the ƒ.64 group, including Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Imogen Cunningham. Weston summed up their approach to photography: “The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.”

At the same time in Southern California, in a nascent Hollywood’s dream factory, photographers George Hurrell, Paul Outerbridge, and William Mortensen rather saw the artifice of Hollywood as an art form itself.

Rolston, clearly most informed by the second group, also creates dreams spun from cinematic gold. One of his most illuminating images is a portrait of Cyndi Lauper, circa 1986, from the series Hollywood Royale: Out of the School of Los Angeles.

Except for the wigs worn in the finale (a tableau of Leonardo DaVinci's The Last Supper,) there is no real hair in the Pageant, because all the headpieces are constructed: sculptures made from latex to appear as hair, or as a hat and, of course, entirely unrealistic makeup. But the artifice is complete once the light hits, along with the help of braces and stirrups to hold the pose. Perspective is everything.

It's a piece of pure magic, old-fashioned and comforting, and starkly contrasts with our own age’s technological speed, exhausting even for the most fervent believer in the wonders of our brave new techno world. The Pageant is time given back. We can sit and linger on an image and marvel at these multiple human endeavours; the artist that painted the original work and the people creating the art on the stage.

In the Summer of 2021, the exhibition of Rolston’s Art People: The Pageant Portraits opened at The Laguna Art Museum. The show was curated by Dr. Malcolm Warner and brought together three pillars of the artistic community: the museum, the pageant, and the people. It signified a rebirth for the community emerging from the covid lockdown. Julie Perlin Lee, who took over from Dr Warner as the museum executive director during the lockdown, said, “The exhibition re-energised the museum. It was a tremendous moment in time. It’s hard to describe the energy in the room. This opening was extra special for so many reasons, mostly to be together but also to be again with art. For so many of us, it’s what feeds our souls.”

Perlin Lee said, “The artists who started the museum also started the Pageant. We come from the same genesis, so in different ways, we have highlighted our shared history over time but never had an exhibition based solely on the pageant and at this scale. It took a third person’s point of view to focus on the pageant, which is what Matthew did. Obviously, when someone else is speaking for you, it’s very powerful.”

As Rolston says in Laguna Art Museum’s lavishly illustrated catalog of its exhibition, Art People: The Pageant Portraits, "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 centres on the somewhat mysterious subject of the making and appreciation of art. Art is human. We are art."

Below and behind the stage are the makeup and dressing rooms. The top shelf of the makeup room is lined with a sea of floating painted Styrofoam heads, making palpable the Pageant’s analogue nature. Not even a polaroid in sight, every character has their makeup painted on a dummy head, a guide for their nightly re-creation. With roughly 45 works of art to assemble, it’s a lot of characters to prepare.

Up close, the makeup looks like smudges and impressions of shading. The costumes, made from canvas and painted in bold painterly strokes, only make sense when viewed from a distance. A 3-foot smudge becomes the shading on a Venetian gown in a Tiepolo painting. It’s all about perspective and illusion. Within the wooden frame, the scenic artists and master carpenters have meticulously created representations of the paintings and other works using light to flatten the image. It’s a bravura sleight of hand.

The images reveal the process. It begins with the makeup design on the dummy head; then we see the performer as Marcia Weisman, in costume and fully made up. The final reveal of Hockney’s painting American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) is re-created in tableau on the Pageant stage.

“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.”

Rolston’s latest endeavor is an expansive exhibition at Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, California. It’s called Art People: The Pageant Portraits and was curated by Dr. Malcom Warner, the museum’s former executive director. Eighteen large-scale works, some made of multiple panels, fill the galleries of his solo exhibition, accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalog. The most awe-inspiring of Rolston’s works is comprised of twenty-six individual photographs and commands over thirty feet of wall space. It’s entitled The Last Supper. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), the final work of Rolston’s mentor, Warhol, was also entitled The Last Supper. 

The exhibition showcases Rolston’s larger-than-life portraits of the volunteer actors who pose on artfully crafted sets in shimmering costumes and makeup to embody “art people,” that is, the figures in well-known works of art brought to life in an annual tableau vivant entertainment called Pageant of the Masters. This elaborate and perhaps eccentric production is a beloved Southern California tradition that has taken place every summer in the art colony of Laguna Beach for over eighty years. 

Rolston attended Pageant of the Masters many times with his family as a child and remembers being overwhelmed by “the theatricality of it all.” He has said that being exposed to the Pageant as a youngster was a pivotal moment leading to his career as an artist.

Said curator Warner, “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.”

Laguna Beach’s Pageant of the Masters is in itself an incredible meta-journey into art making. It’s a form of art about art about art. So is Art People. “It’s a kind of hall of mirrors,” notes Rolston. “Art People is also a document of people. These are, after all, portraits of the volunteers who perform in the Pageant. They themselves are Art People.”

The resulting photographic portraits explore the humanity within us all, along with the deeper vicissitudes of artworks, including the “hall of mirrors” aspects of artmaking. Some of Rolston’s photos are then based on figures from Pageant living pictures, which are themselves based on paintings and sculptures, which are in turn derived from photos or staged scenes.

His “Da Vinci, The Last Supper (Saint Philip The Curious),” depicting the character St. Philip from Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” is a portrait of a Pageant cast member, heavily made-up, coiffed and dressed to mimic a person from the time of Christ. Portraying a man wearing a somber expression, it eclipses the present, bringing the viewer to a solemn scene from millennia ago.

Rolston’s “Barye, Roger and Angelica,” gracing the cover of the catalog, and serving as a hallmark of the show, is of a young woman painted entirely in gold, including her draped gown and hair, with only her piercing blue eyes revealing her living identity. She is a human being, segueing to become a sculptural work—thereby inverting the Pygmalion myth.

Famous Photographer Focuses on Living Pictures

By Jacqui Palumbo

Each summer night, on an open-air stage in Laguna Beach, California, volunteer performers assemble themselves into "tableaux vivants" - living pictures. They work quickly under the cover of dimmed red or blue lighting, which obscures their movement. When the bright stage lights go on, they have formed near-identical replicas of famous artworks - Edward Hopper's shadowy mid-century painting "Nighthawks," perhaps, or Diego Velasquez’s mysterious, regal family portrait, "Las Meninas."  

For most in the crowd at the annual Pageant of the Masters, the illusion holds perfectly for each 90-second scene. Look closely, however, and you may see the figures move ever so slightly, or the creased lines of makeup on skin. 

Photographer Matthew Rolston, whose new exhibition, called “Art People”, at the Laguna Art Museum features striking portraits of the volunteers who transform themselves into famous artworks, did just that. "I took my field glasses - binoculars - and I looked at those faces on the stage up close, with their crumbling makeup and such," he said in a video interview.  

The photographer may have made a name for himself shooting glamorous celebrity portraits for Andy Warhol's Interview magazine in the 1980s, but at the pageant, Rolston "looked at the imperfection of it all," he said, adding: "And that is what really moved me." 

Shot backstage against plain backgrounds, the photographs take performers out of their familiar settings -- the intricately designed stages modeled on the artworks they imitate.  

The volunteer who plays Eve in a 17th-century painting by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, for instance, is transported from the Garden of Eden to a plain dark backdrop, her red hair tumbling down her shoulders as she clutches the infamous apple. The impersonators of a 1968 David Hockney painting, meanwhile, have been plucked from the artist's color-blocked suburban scene, making their painted garments and exaggerated makeup appear all the more uncanny. 

"When they're on stage, they're not individuals so much as figures in a tableau," Rolston said. "And in a way, their personal identity is removed for that experience for the audience. In my images you can hopefully sense a slightly haunting quality of identity coming through the layers of artifice." 

A Long Community Tradition 

Pageant of the Masters, part of the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts, has been held in the coastal city for nearly a century. The first of its "Living Pictures" shows, in 1933, featured a reimagination of James McNeill Whistler's famous portrait "Whistler's Mother," among other artworks. 

In the 19th century, Impressionist artists flocked to coastal California, and Laguna Beach became a thriving creative community. But when the Great Depression hit, the city needed to encourage spending and position itself as a tourist destination, according to the pageant's longtime director, Diane Challis Davy. "It started from very humble beginnings," she said. 

"They put it on in the open air," she added of the early shows. "They didn't have stage lighting; they cut up curtains and tablecloths to make the costumes. It was rather makeshift." 

Today, Pageant of the Masters is a huge production. Over the course of 90 minutes, performers re-create 40 artworks - including paintings, sculptures and mixed-media works - around a different theme. There's a narrator, who gives the crowd a brief art history lesson with each work, and a live orchestra that produces original compositions. Challis Davy estimates that 140,000 people see the pageant at the Festival of Arts’ Irvine Bowl Recreation Park in a typical year. 

Having only ever been canceled for World War II and the Covid-19 pandemic, the pageant is returning to form with the theme "Made in America." It features re-creations of photographs by Dorothea Lange and paintings by Hopper and Norman Rockwell, among others.  

But no matter the theme, the show has - since 1936 - always closed with Leonardo da Vinci's iconic mural "The Last Supper." It's a fan favorite that helped bring wider attention to the show, Challis Davy said. 

"The pageant got nationwide publicity, because everyone thought it was so charming that the community would reenact 'The Last Supper,'" she said.

The Art of Illusion 

For Rolston, who had not attended the pageant since childhood, returning as an adult in 2016 to create the “Art People” series still conjured the same magic. 

"There is a sense of wonder at the illusion because what they do is so amazingly well crafted," he said. "You really think for a few moments that you're looking at an artwork, and then you realize it's human beings that are painting and costumed. It's a simulacra and an illusion - somewhere between humanity and a depiction of humanity. And that has some intrinsic, almost primitive fascination for people." 

The illusion is maintained with carefully applied makeup, body paint and costumes that emulate light and shadow, according to Challis Davy. The scenes are "flattened" using stage lighting that eliminates shadows, and the artworks are all re-created within a large frame.

As well as painting people and props, the set artists use projectors to cast a scene onto the stage, filling in the image "like a paint by numbers," Challis Davy explained. Having long used old Kodak slide projectors, producers now also use digital video to craft "projections of images and photographs - so it really helps with the storytelling," she added. Over the decades, technological advancements like LED lighting and improved textile paints have also aided production.  

The show has dabbled in live action, too. Challis-Davy's favorite scene, from a few years ago, saw performers create a replica of an Edo-period Japanese woodblock print featuring floating cherry blossoms and imitation snowfall. 

Rolston even had the opportunity to personally participate in 2016, the year he photographed his “Art People” portraits. He was offered the role of Judas in "The Last Supper," though he requested Saint Matthew instead. (He had to stand on a box to meet the height requirement, the photographer recalled with a laugh.) 

"The weirdest part of that experience was when the curtain went up," he said. "There's a collective 'ooh ahh' from the audience, and then applause. And I'm standing there doing absolutely nothing, because that's the job: holding perfectly still for 90 seconds. It was so strange; they're applauding nothing. But of course, they're applauding the stage illusion."

The American photographer and artist Matthew Rolston, a Warhol discovery who rose to fame in the 1980s alongside Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, Annie Leibovitz, and Steven Meisel, attended his first Pageant when he was eight, and has remained fascinated by its tableaux vivants. In this exhibition, Rolston zooms in on the Pageant volunteers who create those “living pictures.” Stripped from their context, Rolston’s monumentally-scaled portraits are at once haunting and moving.

To wit, Rolston now spends time teaching a master class that he authored at his alma mater, ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, and making art that’s completely self-initiated. And he’s come full circle: some of Rolston’s current collectors are the very celebs he used to shoot. He’s created four books of art photography and subsequent gallery shows: one a compendium of his Hollywood portraits from the 1980’s, ‘Hollywood Royale’, and three other books of unique pictures: close-up portraits of a rare collection of dummies at the obscure Vent Haven ventriloquist museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky (a project called ‘Talking Heads’); grand scale portraits of ancient, ashen Christian mummies from the catacombs of Palermo, Sicily (this one called ‘Vanitas’), and now, monumental portraits of makeup-slathered cast members at Laguna Beach’s Pageant of the Masters which he calls ‘Art People’. Some of the prints are over eight feet tall.

Every summer, crowds convene under the stars each evening in an outdoor amphitheater to watch everyday Laguna citizens embody works of art in the famed “tableaux vivant” show. Rolston’s enormous portraits of the performers are currently on view in the exhibition Matthew Rolston, Art People: The Pageant Portraits at Laguna Art Museum. 

Los Angeles asked Rolston how he came to be obsessed with what he calls “Art People”—and how actually he came to be one of them.

How did you come to photograph the players of Pageant of the Masters? The Laguna Festival of the Arts has never allowed a photographer to shoot it, despite many requests.

Seven years ago, I went down to the pageant with friends; we’d all confessed to being ‘Pageant Heads’—just obsessed with the yearly pageant. I took my Nikon field glasses; we had very good seats and we could see all the painted faces up close. I could feel how excited these people, both onstage and in the audience, were about art and embodying art themselves. But under closer scrutiny, with those field glasses, I could see their makeup and costumes—they’re not perfect. The illusion of the show at 50 feet away is uncanny. You absolutely believe what’s presented live on stage is a painting. But it’s the imperfection up close that’s so beautiful to me. I never gave up asking if I could shoot it—and finally, the board of directors of the Festival of Arts, which produces the pageant, agreed.

That’s funny about imperfection, because you’re known as the man who created “beauty light” for your celebrity portraiture of stars like Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Annette Bening, and Michael Jackson in magazines like Rolling Stone, W, Harper’s Bazaar, Oprah, Vanity Fair.

Sure. But my fine art is not commercial photography—I’m not selling any thing or any one and I’m not working for anyone other than myself. It’s a subject I choose; it’s not assigned. For me, this process is more about stripping artifice away than perfecting it—creating it. I was stuck on a particular issue: how do I go about investigating the act of art making? This series of portraits attempts to propose a question: is art-making a defining characteristic of being human – and why do we make art anyway? This is what I was looking to explore. After we went to the pageant that night seven years ago, I knew I’d found the perfect subject and the perfect title: ‘Art People’.

Can you describe what you mean by ‘Art People’?

The collectors, the critics, everyone who goes to Art Basel in Miami, Frieze, museums, galleries, auction houses—those are art people. And the people in Pageant of the Masters – people who take off every night of the summer to become living art, they’re art people too. Just of a very different kind. So perhaps there’s a sly joke in my naming choice. 

You seem to be drawn to all things SoCal since you grew up here. How did Los Angeles shape your imagination, your work?

It’s true. Mine is such a Los Angeles story. I did grow up in Hollywood after all, and don’t they call Hollywood the dream factory? And as a photographer, I spent many years of my practice in that world. So there’s that. And growing up here, some of the traditional things families do with kids is take them to places like Disneyland, the Pageant down in Laguna, and museums like the Huntington Library in San Marino. Those early experiences had a powerful impact. I was around eight years old when I first visited the Huntington with my family. I saw Henry Huntington’s original core collection of 18th century English portraiture. The Gainsboroughs, the Lawrences, the Romneys.  From that point on, I became fascinated with grand scale portraiture and the Greek revival period. Classical shapes. Hellenism. There’s a larger-than-life-size bronze there called ‘Diana the Huntress’ by Houdon. I still go to visit that piece on a regular basis, it’s a touchstone and I think you can see all those early influences in this work.  The other big influence was my mom’s collection of magazines, her Vogues and Bazaars, which I devoured as a kid. She had kept all the great issues from the 50’s and 60’s. The magazines were much more artistic then, with the work by Avedon and the editing of Diana Vreeland. All early Matthew DNA. 

Is that how you wound up shooting for so many magazines? 

I guess so. I always loved the magazines. I started off with Andy Warhol and Interview magazine in New York—I was probably 20. It’s funny, but Andy’s work and aesthetic wound up having a very long-term effect on me. I watched him in the studio, I read all his books, I trailed after him at many a social event in the late 1980’s. And remember that Andy’s main art was always portraiture, and that’s what I do. No doubt there’s a fair amount of Warhol influence in everything I’ve attempted. 

Do you think the things we’re exposed to when we’re young can get permanently imprinted on our imaginations?

Well, I have gone to the Huntington and the Pageant countless times, so in my case definitely yes. My intention with “Art People” may be a little sarcastic, but it’s also personally meaningful. People visit the pageant to see art people. People perform in the pageant to be art people. The theme of the exhibition and the museum’s catalogue is art about art about art —a kind of conceptual hall of mirrors. I idealize my subjects always, but this work is not about the pursuit of perfection. Quite the opposite. Every mole, wrinkle, acne on a forehead is right there, through the makeup and paint. Perhaps it’s a reaction against the surface perfection of my Hollywood work. This whole project is a celebration of the imperfect. I don’t think I would have come to this appreciation at an earlier part of my career. 

Raised in postwar Los Angeles, Rolston was exposed to both classical art and Hollywood imagery, around the city and at area cultural institutions and festivals, including Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach. The 88-year-old annual event brings famous paintings to life—think Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” and Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks”—in a live musical production otherwise known as tableau vivant, or living pictures.

“‘Art People’ as a project is intrinsically connected to the community of Laguna Beach,” he wrote in an email. “The Pageant has been a beloved tradition in Laguna for over eighty years, and very much by and for the community. Let’s remember that the town began as an artist’s colony and that the inception of the Festival and Pageant and the museum itself are historically connected.

“Because of the pandemic the arts community of Laguna (like everywhere) has been nearly shut down for a year, so this event can be seen to mark a kind of rebirth or renaissance for arts in the town of Laguna. I am really proud that my piece knits together the threads of Laguna’s art, history and community and is therefore newly resonant at this particular time.”

From Popular to Fine Art

Rolston’s foray into fine art is the latest chapter in a storied career. He’s photographed everyone from Michael Jackson and Prince to Madonna and Beyoncé for publications including Interview, Rolling Stone, Vogue and Vanity Fair, and he co-directed Christina Aguilera’s award-winning “Candyman” video with the star herself. Rolston has also photographed iconic advertising campaigns for brands such as L’Oréal, Revlon, and Estée Lauder and as a creative director has assisted in the branding of boutique hotels operated by SBE Entertainment and Richard Branson’s Virgin Hotels, among others.

Over the last decade Rolston’s focus has shifted from promoting beauty to dissecting it. “Art People” follows “Talking Heads: The Vent Haven Portraits,” which depicted ventriloquist dummies housed in the Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky.

“The act of using makeup, lighting and sometimes retouching, whatever the tricks are, it all eradicates aging, it all denies death,” he said. “I’m very disturbed by the effects of death anxiety on human culture.”

He traveled to Sicily to take photos of the Christian mummies housed in The Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo. Rolston describes it as an “Expressionist project about death.”

“Vanitas” looks to be Rolston’s most jolting undertaking to date.

“I wanted to celebrate imperfection and the poetry of all that, celebrate age, celebrate weathering, celebrate these things that are rejected in the world of magazines and advertising,” he said. “I’m looking at the same subject matter from a different angle, much more personally and from an older point in my life, a (hopefully) more mature point in my life where I’m more reflective.”

He’s also working on a book, “The Power of Pleasure” based on a master class he teaches at his alma mater ArtCenter focusing on critical thinking and the techniques used in fashion, beauty, and luxury communication.

“Almost everything in the human experience is imagined,” Rolston said. “We have this amazing thing called imagination that we can then make real. We can imagine something and then realize it. That’s rather amazing.”

Rolston poured his efforts into gaining access to the volunteers in Pageant of the Masters, and he got his chance in 2015 when he took on an assignment with the Wall Street Journal. Following that initial contact, he then received permission to follow through with his own project in 2016, and the culmination of that work is now on display at Laguna Art Museum in an exhibition called “Matthew Rolston, Art People: The Pageant Portraits.”

“Although I can recognize total mastery when I see it, I’m certainly no expert in the technicalities of photography,” said Dr. Malcom Warner, the museum’s former executive director and curator of the exhibition. “But it seems to me that the power of Matthew’s work isn’t in the technique; it’s in the humanity, and anyone can relate to that.”

Peter Blake, a member of the Laguna Beach City Council who himself is the owner of a prominent city gallery focused on minimalism, said that he was surprised to find himself fixated on the portraits days after he viewed Rolston’s work for the first time. Blake added that in his opinion the quality of fine art is dependent on the artist’s will and commitment to the intent of their work. He found that Rolston’s portraits were powerful for that reason.

“The only difference between commercial art, graphic art, fine art, is that the fine artist is going to a studio in the morning, and they are making exactly what they want,” Blake said. “They don’t care about you. They don’t care about me. They don’t care about the critics, the curators, the collectors or anybody.

“They are literally expressing themselves in the only way they know how, and there is no other option.”

Rolston’s personal account corroborated those beliefs. Once he secured permission from Pageant of the Masters organizers to make his portrait series, he released himself from expectations of any preconceived idealized visions and was able to capture his subjects as they presented themselves.

“Over time I realized that the commercial work I have done for magazines and advertising and such was not entirely personal,” Rolston said. “While there’s a lot of personality of mine, personal choice in that work, I am there to serve someone else, the person who commissioned the project, the client. With the fine art projects, I’m commissioning the work for myself. I have no one else to answer to or please, I am my own client, so I don’t have to be bound in that way. I have my freedom.”

The series, on display at Laguna Art Museum, showcases his stunning larger-than-life portraits of volunteers who have brought famous works of art to life in Pageant of the Masters, an annual tableau vivant fest in the Southern California art colony of Laguna Beach. 

Rolston remembers attending a Pageant of the Masters performance as a child and recalls being captivated by “the theatricality of it,” he told Los Angeles magazine in a 2019 interview. Rolston found himself back in Laguna in 2015 for an article that would appear in the Wall Street Journal. He spent a day backstage, snapping shots of volunteers who are transformed by pageant staff members into living works of art, mimicking masterpieces by greats such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Henry Matisse and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. 

That assignment inspired “Art People”, which he photographed the following year over the course of many weeks, birthing 23 large-scale works that join brush strokes, makeup artistry and fine art photography in a most tantalizing method of visual storytelling. First unveiled in 2017 at Ralph Pucci Gallery in Los Angeles, the Laguna Art Museum’s exhibition will coincide with the 2021 Pageant season. 

“Laguna Beach’s Pageant of the Masters is in itself an incredible meta-journey into art making. It’s a form of art about art. So is Art People. This project is art about art about art about... it’s kind of a hall of mirrors,” notes Rolston. “Art People is also a document about people. These are, after all, portraits of the volunteers who perform in the Pageant. They themselves are art people.” 

One thing is certain: Rolston sees people and things in a unique way and has the uncanny ability to capture the essence of a subject using his mastery of light and color and perspective. You see it in his portraits of A-listers and legends like Angelina Jolie and Michael Jackson (in fact, Rolston was the last to photograph “The King of Pop” in a formal setting). Some are provocative—a 2008 photo shoot placed Janet Jackson in a cage and S&M gear, and a 2006 portrait of Jack Nicholson captured the actor in a broad, devilish smile, a crimson splash of stage blood across his face and a hand drenched in the stuff, ready to lick it off a finger. 

“My career has been quite the journey,” says Rolston. “From Warhol beginnings, playing with identity in a postmodern style on magazine pages, to expanding that type of thinking into the creation and directing of music videos and other short screen-based works, and now, with more personal projects, on to the gallery wall. What are the connections? Questions about humanity, identity, and a certain romantic love for every subject I have attempted.” 

That said, it took him four years to get permission from the board of directors. "They're very protective of the image of the pageant and I think they are wary of being regarded suspiciously by the official art world as some campy, kitsch thing. But I told Jeffrey Deitch about it and he thought it was the most fantastic thing he'd ever heard of. I think it depends on the person," says Rolston. "The main thing is protecting the privacy of the volunteers who work for free and give up an entire summer of their lives for this.”

Despite an initial rejection, Rolston refused to give up. Two years ago he pitched his friend Christina Brinkley, then a style columnist and news editor at The Wall Street Journal, about assigning him a story on the pageant. "I'm not a documentary photographer, I barely know what I'm doing with a 35mm, I make very meditated, mediated images," explains Rolston, who got the assignment and took the opportunity to make a small documentary with the cast and crew. "I knew I wasn't going to get anything out of that story that I could use, but I knew I could go backstage and meet all the people and then I started to develop a working relationship with [director/producer] Diane Challis Davy.”

After explaining how he wanted to shoot the players with a visual language similar to his hero Richard Avedon's In The American West series, Davy cottoned to Rolston's concept but was concerned about such detailed photography of a stage illusion—via heavy make up and papier-mâché costumes—that is meant to be seen from at least fifty feet away. "It's not meant to be seen with all the imperfections, but I told her the imperfection was the poetry of it," explains Rolston, showing me an image of the "golden acne" on the face of a young woman playing Angelica from Antoine-Louis Barye's Roger and Angelica Mounted on the Hippogriff in the entryway across from the silver Frishmuth diptych. "I'm a portraitist, I'm interested in the humanity of the people in those costumes."

After a few rounds of negotiations the board acquiesced to Rolston's vision and allowed him, for several weeks last summer, to install a makeshift studio in the company's carpentry workshop, with a massive lighting rig to tease out all the painterly qualities in each costume. There he shot two groups of ten people each night as they came off the theater stage.

"I didn't select anyone in particular, I photographed everyone they would give me," says Rolston. The selection of images at Pucci ranges from a nine-foot tall, elongated version of Eve from Brueghel and Rubens's The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man and a bronze version of Sancho Panza from Lorenzo Coullaut Valera's monument to Cervantes in Madrid, to the patinaed Neptune from Jacques Ignace Hittorff's Fontaines de la Concorde in Paris and David Hockney's 1968 portrait of legendary Angeleno art patron Marcia Weisman from American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman). "Talk about art about art about art—this is art chasing its tail.”

Many of these portraits, including the images of Weisman, Frishmuth, and the players in Da Vinci's The Last Supper—Rolston's pièce de résistance from the pageant's final tableaux—are being shown as diptychs and multiple groupings against his uncanny images of corresponding dummy templates the makeup artists use to create their magic. As a bonus, he's showing a short film he made of the process behind Davy's gift to him: a cameo as a permed St. Matthew in The Last Supper finale.

"I didn't know what my art was, I just started making it and it taught me," says Rolston. "This is a piece about art-making.”

“My intention with all three of the fine art projects that I have created so far is to author an image that will entice the viewer — draw them in — and once I have their attention, to use that platform to raise questions that mean something to me about the nature of humanity and what it means to be human,” Rolston wrote in an email from Berlin.

To further bend the boundaries among painting, photography and performance, Rolston used an extremely high-resolution camera system that helped to make the painted surfaces of the subjects resemble actual paintings.

“It’s as close to painting with a camera as I’ve been able to come,” he said. “This work is entirely personal and feeds my soul in a completely different way than my entertainment portraiture.”

A commercial photographer since 1977—his first significant published work was a shot of Steven Spielberg for Andy Warhol’s Interview—the L.A.-based Rolston segued into fine art only about five years ago. This is his third portfolio; the first was a portrait series of ventriloquists’ dummies. “Previously, all my work was commissioned, whereas these projects are self-assigned and self-financed,” he explains. The catalyst for the shift in focus came, he notes, “from the aging process. I wanted to leave behind a legacy of work. I gave myself permission.”

The show also represents a deeper dive into the cultural realm for Ralph Pucci, who has long showcased dance and music performances in his spaces. He set his sights on “an elevated arts program” following his move last March to an up-and-coming gallery-centric area of Hollywood. With its abundant light and expansive volume, his new digs—a 1920s building, once a puppeteer studio, then a dance rehearsal hall— begged for it.

Creating a makeshift backstage studio and working like a speed demon during intermissions and after shows wrapped, Rolston shot 120 subjects over the course of six nights. He also took portraits of the Styrofoam heads the makeup artists use as templates. Then came editing and production. Printed on rag paper, the superhigh-resolution photos are so painterly that distinction between the two mediums is all but blurred. Just peer closely at the silvery man from Harriet Whitney Frishmuth’s sculpture The Dancers or the namesake of Canova, Tomb of the Archduchess Maria Christina (#2).

The exhibition unfolds throughout the gallery’s main level, where another component shares the venue: furniture, natch. Pucci opted to pair the art with recent pieces by Parisian designer Patrick Naggar, whom he’s represented for more than 20 years. The choice was predicated on “the exquisite, timeless nature of the work and the sophistication of its mid-century Italianate spirit,” Pucci explains. The dozen-odd pieces—“adding to the 100 or so I’ve done for Ralph,” Naggar estimates—make a minimalist but forceful statement vis-à-vis the photography. The aerodynamic form of the mirror-top pewter Flow table is “a bit Anish Kapoor,” the designer acknowledges. Likewise the indoor/outdoor fiberglass Positano chairs surrounding the Flight dining table, its carbon-fiber top stabilized by a bronze base. “I like to invent stuff with new materials,” Naggar says, by way of understatement. For his part, Rolston explains that “the ability to exhibit my work in this context is unique. Short of a museum, ultimately my art is intended to live in someone’s home.”

Next up? For Rolston, it’s “Hollywood Royale,” a retrospective of his work from the 1980s at Fahey/Klein Gallery down the street. Future Pucci shows will spotlight Pierre Paulin, artists James Brown and Afi Nayo, and photographer Diego Uchitel. And, of course, the ever-dissolving boundary between fine art and high design.

Rolston began documenting the festival on assignment for the Wall Street Journal in 2015. Realizing that the proceedings were ripe for more in-depth exploration, he spent considerable time familiarizing himself with the tight-knit community of performers, makeup artists, and production designers that assembles each year. “It was important that they understood I wasn’t interested in sensationalizing or patronizing the incredible work they do. I wanted to honor the dignity of the players,” he explains. “I think the level of trust we achieved comes through in the intimacy of the photographs.”

The title of the exhibition, "Art People," also slyly hints at a subject beyond mere documentation. Rolston seems to be posing a provocative question. What makes a person an art person? A fascination with historical classics or a ticket to Art Basel? Perhaps both, perhaps neither. But it’s a question well worth asking, particularly when the inquiry results in artwork as seriously seductive as Rolston’s.

For nearly 85 years, Laguna Beach's Pageant of the Masters has brought to life notable works of art but last year, world-renowned portrait photographer Matthew Rolston was there to document the transformations. The Pageant's tableaux vivant are intended to be viewed from a distance of at least 50 feet. But in the series of photos he calls "Art People: The Pageant Portraits," which goes on display at Ralph Pucci gallery beginning Friday, Oct. 27, Rolston takes a closer look at the people who comprise the beating heart of the event.

"I call the project 'Art People,' and it’s a little bit of a joke," Rolston explains. "That’s what people in the art world are called — curators, collectors. These are not those art people, these are people who are portraying works of art. I don’t think that official art people are aware of the Pageant.”

Rolston’s work has appeared in W, Vogue, GQ, Esquire and just about every publication that puts a premium on beauty and glamour, and he has also directed scads of videos and commercials. But rarely has his eye loomed larger than it does from the massive frames currently hanging in the Pucci showroom. What becomes a legend most? Don’t miss it.