The Pageant of the Masters, Depression Stunt That Survived Ninety Years

In nineteen thirty-two, the Depression had essentially stopped the art market. Artists in Laguna Beach, whose community had been building since the turn of the century, organized the Festival of Arts so they could sell work directly to the public without the gallery middlemen who were themselves barely surviving. It was a practical measure.

The following year, nineteen thirty-three, a painter named Lolita Perine added a sideshow. Local residents dressed in period costumes would pose behind an oversized picture frame, recreating famous paintings as living tableaux for audiences who walked past. The first production was considered amateurish. A new director took over in nineteen thirty-five, renamed the event the Pageant of the Masters, and overhauled the production quality with serious staging, lights designed to match the tonality of oil paintings, and a professional approach to the challenge of making living human beings look, to a seated audience, like figures in a painting.

Ninety years later, the Pageant of the Masters sells out every summer. Productions now involve hundreds of volunteers, a live orchestra, and lighting and makeup technology sophisticated enough to render the texture of impasto brushwork across a person's face and hands. The institution has outlasted the Depression, the artists who founded it, every subsequent economic disruption, and the cultural shifts that have repeatedly been predicted to render the concept quaint. It remains, formally, a fundraiser for an art fair founded because artists could not sell their work during a financial crisis. The art fair is still going too.