The Art Excursions "Pageant of the Masters"
Tour:
The newly restored Getty
Villa in Malibu - An evening performance of "The Pageant of the
Masters" - The Getty Center Museum in Los Angeles - The Huntington
Botanical Gardens, Art Collections and Library - Frank Lloyd Wright's
Hollyhock House - Greene and Greene's Gamble House - The Cathedral of
Our Lady of the Angels - A Day at the "Festival of Arts" in Laguna
Beach - and more...
Supplementary Information on "The Pageant of the
Masters"
What's Wrong With This Picture? (Hint: It's
Real)
"When she's not onstage, Whistler's Mother heads her own
marketing company. Blue Boy is a real estate appraiser. Jesus and his
disciples work a variety of jobs. James the Greater is a consultant.
Judas is a financial planner. And Jesus, a former carpenter, is now a
general contractor. But each evening in July and August, when cool
ocean breezes blow over Laguna Beach, California, these diverse
characters put aside their day jobs, strike familiar poses, hold
them, and become living, breathing masterpieces.
Dusk descends and a few stars wink through the light-washed
Southern California sky. Million-dollar homes gaze down from cliffs
above an outdoor amphitheater where another sellout crowd is
applauding the most unusual art pageant in America. As the applause
dies down, binoculars are lifted throughout the audience. Music
swells, and all attention focuses stage center. The curtain opens to
reveal...a painting.
Elsewhere, art imitates life, but in Laguna Beach, the Pageant of
the Masters inverts the cliché. Since 1933, this arty beach
town has hosted a festival of living art. The pageant features
tableaus vivants &emdash; paintings, statues, murals and other
artworks posed by live actors. Raphael's Sistine Madonna, Washington
Crossing the Delaware, works by Monet, Millet, Van Eyck &emdash; all
are painstakingly posed onstage with such exactitude that audiences
cannot distinguish them from actual paintings.
Such utterances as "amazing" and "fantastic" can be heard
throughout the Irvine Bowl as 40 works of art are presented two
minutes at a time. Each summer, from early July to Labor Day,
audiences flock to the pageant in numbers a museum might envy. And at
the close of each show, great works of art step off the stage and
call it a night."
SOURCE: the Smithsonian Magazine website
(www.smithsonianmag.si.edu)
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