Tableau vivant
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was also a type of tableau 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.
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.
The Realism movement, with more naturalistic depictions, did not begin until the mid-19th century, a direct reaction against Romanticism and its heavy dependence on stylized tableau format.
By the 1890s the settings had become very elaborate, as when her third son Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, his wife and their three children posed for a Japanese Scene, in 1891.
Several tableaux are performed each year at the school carol service, including the depiction of an engraving en grisaille (in which the subjects are painted and dressed completely grey).
The February 1917 edition of the American magazine Harper's Bazar reported, with many photographs, on two events in London where society ladies posed, mostly as paintings.
One event concentrated on paintings by James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, posed by ladies of American birth in London.
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 dancer Olga 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").
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 in Great Windmill Street, London.
Nude and semi-nude poses plastiques were also a frequent feature of variety shows in the US: first on Broadway in New York City, then elsewhere in the country.
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".
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.
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).
More recently, Canadian artist Sylvia Grace Borda has worked since 2013 to continue to stage tableaux for the camera within the Google Street View engine.
Through her efforts to pioneer the tableaux vivant for online exploration, she and her collaborator, John M. Lynch, won the Lumen Prize 2016 for Web Arts.
The paintings include Rembrandt's The Night Watch; Goya's The Parasol, Third of May 1808, La Maja Desnuda, Charles IV of Spain and His Family; Ingres' The Valpinçon Bather, The Turkish Bath; Delacroix's Entry of the Crusaders in Constantinople, Jacob wrestling with the Angel; El Greco's Assumption of the Virgin; Watteau's The Embarkation for Cythera.
