"Tableaux Vivants: the Influence of Theater." Fashion, History, Museums: Inventing the Display of Dress

Petrov, Julia. "Tableaux Vivants: The Influence of Theater." Fashion, History, Museums: Inventing the Display of Dress. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019. 113–136. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 27 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350049024.ch-006>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 27 September 2021, 22:22 UTC. Copyright © Julia Petrov 2019. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 5 TABLEAUX VIVANTS: THE INFLUENCE OF THEATER A painting is primarily experienced as a two-dimensional work of art, whereas museum exhibitions operate in three dimensions, and thus, the showmanship of theater has also influenced the display of historical fashion. Early curators such as Doris Langley Moore and the team behind the Costume Institute at the Met had theater design backgrounds and infused their exhibitions with the type of spectacle with which they were professionally familiar. Even now, major museums such as the Met often draw on the expertise of theatrical lighting and set designers to stage their blockbuster shows. In this chapter, theater and performativity are used to explain how the representation of life and movement was staged in fashion exhibitions. To a large extent, this has relied on the creation of mannequin “actors,” clothing’s occupants in effigy, which could be posed alongside other mannequins or objects and props, as though interacting with them. Whether by placing mannequins onto stages of period rooms or into semi-furnished vignettes, or by staging fashion shows where live models wore museum pieces, theatrical practices of choreography and spectatorship influence any display that attempts to inject a semblance of life to a mannequin pantomime. In Noordegraaf’s view (2004), museums share with and draw on the visual regimes of department stores, other museums, and cinema. The interplay between the physicality of the museum, the presence and needs of visitors, and the intellectual preoccupations of the museum administration (directors, designers, and curators) is defined by Noordegraaf within a cinematic metaphor as a “script.” It follows, then, that it is possible to outline the roles of the artifacts as players and museum visitors as audience. As a form of museum interpretation, theater has had a long history. Mida (2015b) notes a dramaturgical turn in contemporary fashion exhibitions in describing the affective and spectacular qualities of displays by curators such as Andrew Bolton, Judith Clark, and Pamela Golbin. Their reliance on thematic tableaux as an aesthetic device for organizing exhibition narratives is far from new. Indeed, it is in line with some of the earliest approaches to interpreting 114 FASHION, HISTORY, MUSEUMS historical fashion, which arose out of the popular custom of masquerade in pageant- or tableau vivant-form. Itself a legacy of the historicism that arose in the Romantic movement of the 1830s, dressing up in historical costume (real or replica) became a fashionable pastime for the upper- and middle classes; once historical costume could no longer be animated by live models, museums would then have to rely on elaborate staging to evoke intimate moments in history. The spectacle of authenticity As collections and exhibitions of historical fashion have been shown to have emerged out of artistic concerns and were seen to be important for artistic development, they can be expected to demonstrate conventions characteristic of this origin. In particular, the perceived importance of an aura of “authenticity”1 and intellectual authority to the look of a museum artifact in an exhibition was inherited from the writing and work of painters, engravers, and theater designers who studied costume in earlier periods. Anne Hollander wrote, “Any real public knowledge of authentic historical dress has been invaded and corrupted by stage conventions of such long standing that they seem to have the sanction of real history” (1993: 301–302). Hollander argued that often the perception of authenticity is triggered by a key conventional prop, such as a white wig for the eighteenth-century or a ruff for the Elizabethan period. Once the key prop is recognized, the audience slips into comfortably ignoring any possible anachronisms, certain that what they are seeing is “accurate.” Indeed, a 1962 Times article on the rearranged Costume Court at the V&A described the usefulness of the museum for suggesting details for increased period accuracy in film and performance: It is not necessary for an historical play or film to be meticulously accurate in every detail of costume down to a button or bow, but some degree of accuracy has its part in recapturing the spirit of an age and here such a mine of reference as the Costume Court is rich in suggestion. (“History in Clothes” 1962: 9) The museum’s display of artifacts could define a stereotyped or conventional look for any given period. These conventions first developed for designers out of the visual shorthands and conceptual biases in the illustrated costume history books discussed in the previous chapter. As Ulrike Ilg writes, these relied on numerous assumptions about the material world and its ability to be represented (Ilg 2004: 43). The self-positioning of the text as authoritative, as well as its vocabulary of visual symbolism—repeating poses, styles, regional costumes, and periods— TABLEAUX VIVANTS: INFLUENCE OF THEATER 115 contributed to the creation of a language of costume studies, a language that evolved out of visual media and into the three-dimensional world of museums. As images of past events rely on conventions to be understood, historian Stephen Bann uses Roland Barthes’s notion of the effet de reél, or “reality effect,” to explain the genre of the narrative historical painting, commenting that “it is precisely the authentic detail which appears almost gratuitous—which passes almost unnoticed—that will confirm and enhance the historical realism of the image” (1984: 57). Bann notes that this effect relies upon the viewer’s visual literacy and familiarity with other similar works, requiring “the persistence of the effect, or at least its non-contradiction; and that implies the existence of a discourse in which such an effect can echo and reverberate” (1984: 58). He calls this the “historical series,” and it is a useful concept for considering the museal portrayal of historical fashion in the period under investigation. One example can be seen in the postcards produced of the Museum of the City of New York’s costume alcoves (Figure 5.1): the black-and-white image of a furnished mid- nineteenth-century period room populated by mannequins dressed in clothing of the time is cropped to imitate the photographs of the same era. The effect is Figure 5.1 Postcard, c. 1945, showing mannequins in fashions contemporary to the furnishings of a period room at the Museum of the City of New York. Author’s collection. 116 FASHION, HISTORY, MUSEUMS to induce the visitor to imagine that the mannequins are the actual inhabitants of the room in 1855— the clothing, furniture, and architectural detail all of the same time as the image and not a carefully constructed illusion from 1941. This way of seeing was practiced and promoted by artists, authors, dramatists, and museums alike, creating a visual regime that disciplined the public to react positively to what they were led to believe was authentic. Indeed, the constant repetition of effect would only serve to emphasize its apparent authenticity. The use of tableaux that recreate a two-dimensional source image is an obvious means by which to draw a visual analogy between fashion and art. If dress is “living sculpture” (Rosenthal 2004: 103), then mannequins in historical clothing can throw art into relief. Yet all too often, the result devalues both sources. While drawing on images as documents to support the authenticity of the museum presentation is normal, and laudable, the source images are rarely used alongside the reenacted tableaux, so that the general public does not necessarily recognize any added value to the exhibition. The object becomes documentary of the art as opposed to vice versa. Where the primary source material is used, the painting (or in the case of the Met’s 2009 Model as Muse exhibition, the fashion photograph) is reduced to an illustration, while the dress artifact becomes a prop to support the reality effect of the assemblage. In addition, the audience cannot engage in the imaginative projection necessary to intellectually participate in the display’s content. Rather, it is the display itself that is on display, the content and formal qualities flattened and represented as spectacle; the exhibit so conspicuously copies its source material that what is most notable is the act of representation itself. The viewing public marvels at the recreated likeness, rather than feeling transported into the past. As Handler and Gable warn, “Mimetic realism thus deadens the historical sensibility of the public. It teaches people not to question historians’ stories, not to imagine other, alternative histories, but to accept an embodied tableau as the really real” (1997: 224). It is the artful assemblage, not the object, that is highlighted in this type of exhibition design. Hyperreal effects inherited from wax museums and dioramas (see Sandberg 2003) were, in the early days of costume display, more likely to be read as authentic. For example, in France, the nucleus of the collection of the City of Paris Museum of Fashion was that collected by Maurice Leloir, an artist and member of the famous Leloir-Toudouze fashion illustrator clan. Before its current location in the Palais Galliera, the collection was displayed at the Musée Carnavalet in tableaux. An Australian newspaper reported, Most of the costumes were produced by the artist Leloir fifty years ago, and to this original collection later creations have been added.

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