![]() ![]() The impulse to create a tableau vivant shares something with the efforts, now cliché, to compare dramatic journalistic photos to Renaissance paintings, and shots of deserted cities to Edward Hopper’s realist compositions. In confronting the strange horror of a contemporary global pandemic, thousands have turned to models offered by classical oil paintings and five-hundred-year-old frescoes. The playful demeanor with which the actors have adopted poses and gestures may itself be the facade, masking underlying anxiety. Rather than merely replicating paintings, such images transform their sources by allowing traces of the pandemic-both physical and psychic-into the scene. In another widely circulated tableau, French health-care workers in scrubs and PPE gather around a long table to evoke Leonardo’s Last Supper. Left, Ilya Repin’s Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581, 1883-85. A quarantine stockpile of onions and packaged foods stands in for the riverside foliage Millais depicted in his Shakespearean scene. One woman re-created John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52) by lying in her bathtub fully clothed and half-submerged in water. All the searing filicidal anguish Ilya Repin depicted in Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan (1885) comes through in an image of a man cradling a mountain bike in disrepair. The best pandemic tableaux vivants come from Russia, where a Facebook page devoted to art in isolation has become a clearinghouse. Tableaux vivants offer a home-school lesson in semiotics, with wry substitutions revealing the mechanisms of pictorial meaning. Ingenious substitutions count for more: the beach towel that becomes Napoleon’s flowing red cape as he crosses the Alps, the wooden ruler that becomes a ruler’s scepter. In fact, employing pro lighting setups to replicate chiaroscuro or real satin to evoke Renaissance finery feels almost like cheating. When it comes to assessing tableaux vivants, production value is beside the point. And while figurative paintings composed in linear perspective are most readily reconstructed for the camera, tableau vivant sources also include Persian miniatures and modernist abstractions. ![]() ![]() ( The Birth of Venus appears to be as popular a model now as it was for Victorian teens in the 1860s.) The medium also affords genuine opportunities for education: Opera singer and writer Peter Brathwaite has highlighted African diaspora figures in European and American art. For some users, the museum challenge is an opportunity to send nudes under the guise of a quasi-sophisticated cultural exercise. Lots of people have cast themselves or their pets as Girls with Pearl Earrings. Lap dogs perform as the Christ child, and average adults pose as so many tormented Jesuses. On a formal level, Shahn’s angular modernist composition lends itself well to clunky living room constructions, but the paintings most often pantomimed in recent weeks tend to be instantly recognizable masterpieces of Western art. Hazel Lavery (wife of the painter Sir John Lavery) performing as Bitticelli’s Primavera at the Picture Ball Held at the Albert Hall, London, 1913. Tableaux vivants may be relevant again today precisely because they offer a way, however indirect, to connect the experience of isolated life indoors to the dread outside. But even with the lighthearted tone, the tableau amplifies rather than diminishes the gravity of the painting. Instead of prim Victorian moralizing, my friend’s image offers the irony of bringing life and innocence into Shahn’s visual condemnation of state brutality. Why rely on a virtual experience of art when you can be the image yourself?Ĭontemporary tableaux vivants revive a practice that originated among the Enlightenment-era aristocracy and then peaked in popularity in the nineteenth century as a parlor game designed to instill players with an appreciation for Art. Though the results are viewable on Instagram and Twitter, the process of staging a tableau also represents something of a counterweight to the torrents of instantly accessible digital content that museums have churned out in recent weeks. With museums and galleries in the United States shuttered, tableaux vivants keep people connected to art in an immediate, physical way. Tableaux vivants, literally living pictures, have become a popular shelter-in-place pastime, driven by museum hashtags, like #gettychallenge, that prompt people to re-create iconic masterpieces and post their versions online alongside the originals. Seeking a Way to Touch Through Film in a Time of Isolation ![]()
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