If you have spent much time on social media lately – that would be Social Media 2.0: The Quarantine Version – you may have seen posts of people who have used their unlooked-for time at home to pose as famous works of art. The
There are several examples that spring to mind. One comes from the Instagram account purportedly of Honey, an Italian greyhound in Oslo, who somehow dressed herself in the manner of Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” using a tennis ball as the key accessory – a brilliant interpretation in its playful simplicity, on the order of Picasso’s “Bull’s Head” made solely from a bicycle seat and handlebars. Another uses a crowd of people to re-create Picasso’s “Guernica,” originally a sprawling, didactic canvas meant to commemorate the bombing of a Basque town by the Nazis in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. This pandemic iteration, which seems to have been composed by a family of five plus a plush cow and a stuffed moose toy, somehow seems to say more about staying home than the original did about war.
We have had these tableaux vivants, the French term for living pictures, for a long time – at least as far back as the Renaissance, in Western art, when costumed people were assembled in dramatic groupings to depict Bible stories or battles; but they were the models and the artist was the audience. People were assembling themselves as living works of art as a form of entertainment, for the parlor or the stage, going back at least to the early 19th century. When a series of scenes were produced to advance a story, they became the forerunners of magic lantern shows, comic strips and movies. When the still camera was advanced enough to be affordable, by the middle of the 19th century, it was used to capture these tableaux.
In Boston in 1860 we find J.E. Tilton & Co. publishing J.H. Head’s “Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants,” out of “a sincere desire to extend the influence of a pure and ornamental art,” and dedicated to “those friends who have participated with me in many of these scenes.” It told one how to make frozen depictions of “The Reception of Queen Victoria at Cherbourg” (in 1858), requiring 10 female figures and 20 males, one of whom got to be Napoleon III in a scene that had been featured in a sensational painting the year before by Jules Achille Noël.
In 1895, a “craze for ‘living pictures’” took Calgary, Alberta – all 4,000 residents – by storm. Thanks to “Cowtown: an album of early Calgary,” we know that Calgarians in 1895 used their Opera House to present for themselves a series of living pictures from the life of Cinderella, which they likely would have known from the Brothers Grimm; “Cinderella Dressing Her Sisters,” “Cinderella Meets The Fairy Prince,” etc., featuring “Misses M. Ryan, A. Perley and J. Pinkham” – all indisputable belles.
At the time, the rules and regulation of theater in New York and London held that an actress could not be nude onstage unless she stood absolutely still. Thus did the making of living pictures became a form of erotic commercial entertainment, with scenes such as “Nymphs Bathing,” which would have made Head blush, offered at the Ziegfeld Follies and the Windmill Theatre, and then, eventually, in American carnival sideshows, where they petered out – only to be reborn as a clothed byway of fine art and kitsch in the last several decades, setting the stage for a rebirth of living pictures as contemporary pandemic entertainment today.
