The draw of the Pageant

AT THE GALLERIES

Is the Pageant of the Masters art, or merely an attraction? There is

no doubt that the Pageant defies description and category. Novelty

(if you can call 70 years of performances “novel”) is often dismissed

as kitsch or common, yet the art world values things rich and rare.

Sitting in the audience for this year’s Pageant, “Seasons,” I had to

ask myself as a critic, why does it fill us with wonder?

At one point, early in the production, the narrator, Skip Conover,

tells us the goal of each tableau is to “replicate the impression” of

the original. Of course, this is not the goal of the Pageant. The

goal is to transmute the solitary experience of looking at a painting

into a communal spectacle, far beyond what the original could

possibly accomplish. It expands the “impression” of art out of the

zone of familiar artistic experience. In short, the Pageant of the

Masters is performance art.

As the audience around me listened to the soothing voice of

Conover explain the Pageant, they watched the dimly lighted

stagehands and performers set up John Whetten Ehninger’s 1867

painting, “October.” Ehninger is not exactly an old master, but in

the creative vision of the Pageant, “October” becomes something else,

something astonishing. The spectators give sound to their emotions

with “whoas” and “wows” as the correct lighting hits the stage, the

music strikes and suddenly something that we know is

three-dimensional becomes flat, and takes on the patina and range of

tones only aged oils on canvas possess.

The 19th-Century poet and critic S.T. Coleridge described this

phenomenon perfectly: it is a “semblance of truth” granted

temporarily to “shadows of imagination” he called “the willing

suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic

faith.” We want to be deceived.

Coleridge was speaking of the peculiar instant when you loose your

sense of self when reading or watching a play (now, the phrase is

often applied to film). But as the lights come up on the familiar and

cliche Currier and Ives litho, “The Road-Winter” -- that Christmas

card image of a Victorian couple on a sled pulled by lithe gray

horses through the snow -- we gasp. You forget your familiarity with

the image, listen to the music, and see the transfixed figures on the

stage with astonishment.

This, Coleridge was pointing out, is an act of imagination. To

accomplish such a leap requires great skill on the part of the

artist. In this case, we’re not talking about Currier and Ives; the

“artist” is the mass of volunteers, skilled painters, and production

people that design and execute the moment on the stage.

I have said before that the Pageant of the Masters is

indescribable. It really must be experienced. That is also true of

great art. If I detailed for you the majesty and pathos in da Vinci’s

“The Last Supper,” it would not replicate the power of the fresco as

you see it on the wall.

And the Pageant in part can magnify the experience of art, even if

(perhaps especially if) the original is mediocre and tired (as in the

case of John Falter and Norman Rockwell).

This suspension of disbelief gets even more astounding when the

Pageant takes on the decorative arts. It’s somewhat disconcerting

when the Art Nouveau bronze lamps of Charles Jonchery and Louis

Chadon appear magnified on the stage. Nouveau idealized and stylized

the female figure into something organic and impossibly plant-like.

But here, the mind knows, are real women in body make-up. But they

aren’t; they are lamps.

When four porcelain figurines in eighteenth-century dress appear

above the stage, the audience takes a quick breath; not because they

are giant porcelain figurines, but because we know they are not. Yet

they bear the shine of glazed blues, reds, and yellows familiar to

porcelain.

It is that range of experience in art that really makes the

Pageant so amazing. The four Japanese woodblock prints by Torii

Kiyonaga reproduce the shadowless bold color and compactness of the

original “Four Scenes from the Floating World.” The unknown sculptors

who cast the two bronzes of Shiva in the Pageant, as the cosmic

dancer destroying time, were attempting to capture the wild movements

of his dance. Yet here are the artists of the Pageant, doing

everything possible to capture the stillness of the sculpture.

But I believe the Pageant is best when it manages to reproduce not

just the visual qualities of the original (as it does so well with

popular subjects, like John Van Hamersveld’s “The Endless Summer,”

the famous day-glow lithograph for the movie), but the emotive

qualities as well. This happens when the narrative, the music, the

lighting, the right match of model and subject all dovetail perfectly

together. The depiction of Edward Hopper’s oil, “Summer Evening,”

floods the air of the amphitheater with sadness and that incredible

emotional void that seems to be in much of Hopper’s work. It’s a

discomforting feeling of voyeurism in sympathy, where the entire

theater acts as one viewer, filled with the awkwardness and isolation

of the couple on the porch.

In those brief moments during the experience of the Pageant of the

Masters, when the painting “comes to life,” we experience something

akin to dreaming: we live another life. “They have power,” as Byron

said of dream images, “They make us what we are not ... and shake us

with the vision that’s gone by.” Isn’t that what we should demand of

all art?

* BOBBIE ALLEN is a poet and writer who has taught art theory and

criticism. She currently teaches at Saddleback College.