Atableau vivant (French:[tablovivɑ̃]; often shortened totableau;pl. tableaux vivants;French for 'living picture') is a staticscene containing one or more actors or models. They are stationary and silent, usually in costume, carefully posed, withprops and/orscenery, and may betheatrically illuminated. It thus combines aspects oftheatre and thevisual arts.
They were a popular medieval form that revived considerably from the 19th century, probably as they were very suitable for recording byphotography. The participants were now mostly amateurs, participating in a quick and easy form ofamateur dramatics that could be brought together in an evening, and required little skill in acting or speaking. They were also popular for various sorts of community events and parades.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was also a type oftableau used in the professional theatre, taking advantage of the extra latitude the law[citation needed] allowed for the display of nudity so long as the actors did not move. Tableaux featuredposes plastiques ('flexible poses') by virtually nude models, providing a form oferotic entertainment, both on stage and in print. Tableaux continue to the present day in the form ofliving statues, street performers who busk by posing in costume. In film or live theatre the performers sometimes briefly freeze in position for atableau vivant effect.
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In the Middle Ages occasionally aMass was punctuated with short dramatic scenes and painting-liketableaux. They were a major feature of festivities for royal weddings, coronations androyal entries into cities. Often the actors imitated statues or paintings, much in the manner of modern street entertainers, but in larger groups, and mounted on elaborate temporary stands along the path of the main procession.[1]Johan Huizinga, inThe Autumn of the Middle Ages, describes the use and design of tableaux vivants in theLate Middle Ages. Many paintings and sculptures probably recreate tableaux vivants, by which art historians sometimes account for groups of rather static figures. Artists were often the designers of public pageantry of this sort.
The history of Western visual arts in general, until the modern era, has had a focus on symbolic, arranged presentation, and (aside from direct personal portraiture) was heavily dependent on stationary artists' models in costume – which can be regarded as small-scaletableaux vivants with the artist as temporary audience. TheRealism movement, with morenaturalistic depictions, did not begin until the mid-19th century, a direct reaction against Romanticism and its heavy dependence on stylizedtableau format.
The invention of photography caused a revival in the form. Initially photography was expensive, and the form flourished in theEnglish country house parties of the rich.Queen Victoria was an early adopter (only taking the part of the audience herself). In the mid-1850s the actors were her children, who performed tableaux for their parents 14th wedding anniversary in 1854. By the 1890s the settings had become very elaborate, as when her third sonPrince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, his wife and their three children posed for aJapanese Scene, in 1891.[2]
They became popular for community events and festivals, very often using children, who might parade before settling into atableau for the audience and a camera.
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Beforeradio,film andtelevision,tableaux vivants were popular forms of entertainment, even in American frontier towns.[3] Before the age of colour reproduction of images, thetableau was sometimes used to recreate artworks on stage, based on an etching or sketch of a painting. This could be done as an amateur venture in a drawing room, or as a more professionally produced series oftableaux presented on a theatre stage, one following another, usually to tell a story without requiring all the usual trappings and production of a full theatre performance. They thus influenced the form taken by laterVictorian andEdwardian eramagic lantern shows, and perhaps also sequential narrativecomic strips (which first appeared in modern form in the late 1890s).
Tableaux vivants were often performed as part of schoolNativity plays in England during the Victorian period; the custom is still practised atLoughborough High School (believed to be one of England's oldest grammar schools for girls). Severaltableaux are performed each year at the school carol service, including the depiction of an engravingen grisaille (in which the subjects are painted and dressed completely grey).
Tableaux were also performed for charity events. The February 1917 edition of the American magazineHarper's Bazar reported, with many photographs, on two events in London where society ladies posed, mostly as paintings. One event concentrated on paintings byJames McNeill Whistler andJohn Singer Sargent, posed by ladies of American birth in London. The other includedViolet Trefusis andLady Diana Cooper.[4]
By a quirk of English law, nudity on the stage was not permitted unless the performers remained motionless while the stage curtains were open; the situation in locations in the United States was often similar. In the early years of the 20th century, performers took advantage of this exception to stage "plastic representations", as they were sometimes called, centring on nudity. The most persistent performer in this line was the German dancerOlga Desmond, beginning in London, and who later put on "Evenings of Beauty" (Schönheitsabende) in Germany, in which she posed nude in imitation of actual or imagined classical works of art ("living pictures").[5] The English tradition in risqué entertainment continued until English law was changed in the 1960s.
In the nineteenth century,tableaux vivants took such titles as "Nymphs Bathing" and "Diana the Huntress" and were to be found at such places as the Hall of Rome inGreat Windmill Street, London. Other venues were theCoal Hole in theStrand and the Cider Cellar inMaiden Lane. Nude and semi-nudeposes plastiques were also a frequent feature of variety shows in the US: firston Broadway inNew York City, then elsewhere in the country. TheZiegfeld Follies featured suchtableaux from 1917. TheWindmill Theatre in London (1932–1964) featured nudeposes plastiques on stage; it was the first, and for many years the only, venue for them in 20th-century London.
Tableaux vivants were often included in fairground sideshows (as seen in the 1961 filmA Taste of Honey). Such shows had largely died out by the 1970s, but continue in theBridgewater Carnival inSomerset.[6] Tableaux remain a major attraction at the annualPageant of the Masters inLaguna Beach, California.[7]
Jean-François Chevrier was the first to use the termtableau in relation to a form of art photography, which began in the 1970s and 1980s in an essay titled "The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photography" in 1989.[8] The initial translation of this text substitutes the English wordpicture for the French wordtableau. However,Michael Fried retains the French term when referring to Chevrier's essay, because according to Fried (2008), there is no direct translation into English fortableau in this sense. Whilepicture is similar, "... it lacks the connotations of constructedness, of being the product of an intellectual act that the French word carries." (p. 146)[9]Other texts[10][11] andClement Greenberg's theory of medium specificity also cover this topic.
The key characteristics of the contemporary photographictableau according to Chevrier are, firstly:
They are designed and produced for the wall. summoning a confrontational experience on the part of the spectator that sharply contrasts with the habitual processes of appropriation and projection whereby photographic images are normally received and "consumed" (p. 116)[8]
By this, Chevrier notes that scale and size is obviously important if the pictures are to "hold the wall". But size has another function; it distances the viewer from the object, requiring one to stand back from the picture to take it all in. This "confrontational" experience, Fried notes,[9] is actually quite a large break from the conventional reception of photography, which up to that point was often consumed in books or magazines.
The photographictableau has its roots not in the theatricaltableau vivant, but inpictorialist photography, such as that ofAlfred Stieglitz, a movement with its roots inAestheticism, which already made heavy use of thetableau as a non-theatrical visual art style. Pictorialism, according toJeff Wall[11] could be seen as an attempt by photographers to imitate painting (perhaps unsuccessfully):
Pictorialist photography was dazzled by the spectacle of Western painting and attempted, to some extent, to imitate it in acts of pure composition. Lacking the means to make the surface of its pictures unpredictable and important, the first phase of Pictorialism, Stieglitz's phase, emulated the fine graphic arts, re-invented the beautiful look, set standards for gorgeousness of composition, and faded. (p. 75)[11]
However photography did have the ability tobecome unpredictable and spontaneous. This was achieved by making photographs related to the inherent capabilities of the camera itself. And this, Wall argues,[11] was a direct result ofphotojournalism, and themass media andpop culture industries.
By divesting itself of the encumbrances and advantages inherited from older art forms, reportage, or the spontaneous fleeting aspect of the photographic image pushes toward a discovery of qualities apparently intrinsic to the medium, qualities that must necessarily distinguish the medium from others and through the self-examination of which it can emerge as a modernist art on a plane with others. (pp. 76–78)[11]
The argument is that, unlike most other art forms, photography can profit from the capture of chance occurrences. Through this process—the snapshot, the "accidental" image—photography invents its own concept of the picture: a hybrid form of the "Western picture" (pictorialist photography) and the spontaneous snapshot. This is the stage whereby Wall[11] argues that photography enters a "modernist dialectic". Wall states that unpredictability is key to modern aesthetics. This new concept of the picture, which Wall proposes, with the compositional aspects of the Western picture combined with the unpredictability that the camera affords through its shutter, can be seen in the work of many contemporary photographic artists, includingLuc Delahaye,Andreas Gursky,Thomas Struth,Irene Caesar, andPhilip-Lorca diCorcia.
Thetableau as a form still dominates the art photography market. As Fried notes: "Arguably the most decisive development in the rise of the new art photography has been the emergence, starting in the late 1970s and gaining impetus in the 1980s and after, of what the French critic Jean-François Chevrier has called the "tableau form" (p. 143).[9]
However, there appears to be only a handful of young, emerging artists working within thetableau form. Examples includeFlorian Maier Aichen, Matthew Porter andPeter Funch. More recently, Canadian artistSylvia Grace Borda has worked since 2013 to continue to stagetableaux for the camera within theGoogle Street View engine.[12][13] Her work creates 360° immersivetableau vivant images for the viewer to explore. Through her efforts to pioneer thetableaux vivant for online exploration, she and her collaborator, John M. Lynch, won theLumen Prize 2016 for Web Arts.[14]
InPier Paolo Pasolini's 1963 filmLa ricotta, a film maker tries to have actors depict two paintings, byJacopo Pontormo andRosso Fiorentino, of the Passion of Jesus.
The 1969 filmThe Color of Pomegranates, directed by Sergei Parajanov, presents a loose biography of the Armenian poet Sayat Nova in a series oftableaux vivants of Armenian costume, embroidery and religious rituals depicting scenes and verses from the poet's life.
Jean-Luc Godard's filmPassion (1982) is about the making of an ambitious art film that uses re-creations of classical European paintings astableaux vivants, set to classical European music. The paintings includeRembrandt'sThe Night Watch;Goya'sThe Parasol,Third of May 1808,La Maja Desnuda,Charles IV of Spain and His Family;Ingres'The Valpinçon Bather,The Turkish Bath;Delacroix'sEntry of the Crusaders in Constantinople, Jacob wrestling with the Angel;El Greco'sAssumption of the Virgin;Watteau'sThe Embarkation for Cythera.
ThroughoutDerek Jarman's filmCaravaggio (1986 film), many of Caravaggio's paintings are recreated in tableau vivant to explore their relationship to his life.
The 1991 filmMy Own Private Idaho presents its sex scenes using the effect.
The 2005 filmMrs Henderson Presents is based on a true story of theWindmill Theatre in London featuring tableaux vivants during the Second World War.
The 2013 film,A Field in England,[15] makes use of the effect to add to the general occult look of the film.
There is a 2014 Estonian feature film produced entirely intableau format titledIn the Crosswind.[16]
