Most of us are familiar with an artistic technique called trompe-l'oiel. Taken from the French words for "fool the eye", the term refers to paintings or other artworks that are so realistic that they fool the viewer's eye into thinking that they are the real thing. We see a garden scene created with trompe-l'oiel technique and we want to reach out and pick the flowers, dabble our feet in the creek, duck behind a column to avoid a rather angry-looking bumblebee.
The Southern California city of Laguna Beach each summer reverses this process. Instead of making painted surfaces seem as real as life, living human models are made to look like paintings and other forms of art.
You could say that it was a case of life imitating art.
The occasion for this annual transformation is the "Pageant of the Masters", a full-length program of tableaux vivants that each year accompanies two annual art festivals. Laguna Beach is located in Orange County, certainly better known for its theme parks like Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm. But Laguna Beach is a city that is home to a very high number of artists, many of whom make their living by painting and photographing the beautiful scenery of this part of the California coast, and so it is appropriate that the summer amusements here should center on Picasso and not Mickey and Minnie.
Tableaux vivants are simply "living paintings" made up of models who pose as motionlessly as possible to create a scene that lives for a moment and then, as the lights go down and the curtain closes, vanishes to be replaced by another one. Each summer the artists and models involved in the Pageant of the Masters create a series of these tableaux, which effectively - if momentarily - turn humans into works of art. The annual offerings include dozens of recreated pieces of art, both two-dimensional and three-dimensional, from Rembrandt's canvases to glass sculptures by Lalique.
The three-dimensional works are obv...