‘Freemasonry’: Mystery, Magic, Spectacle

Today’s culture is awash in theme parks and electronic special-effects movies. This baroque efflorescence causes concerned pundits to conclude that Americans now prefer the fake to the real. The current exhibition at Cal State Long Beach’s University Art Museum reminds us that around here a taste for spectacle is as old as P.T. Barnum.

“Theatre of the Fraternity: Staging the Ritual Space of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, 1869-1929” is not, strictly speaking, an art show. It’s a glimpse of Americana that should, however, fascinate any art lover with a sense of history, humor and a taste for memorabilia.

Focused on a craze for fraternal organizations that swept the states at the turn of the century, it marked the moment when we came to be called “a nation of joiners.”

In 1907, according to one wall label, some 300 fraternities, such as the Knights of Columbus, the Order of Red Men and--the central focus of this exhibition--the Masons, had about 6 million members. Add auxiliaries for women and kids and you face a phenomenon that involved something well over half the population.

The fraternity boom involved a complex mix of social factors. The European immigrant population was growing affluent, feeling homesick and longing to belong and feel special. In the starchy Midwest, where these brotherhoods were especially popular, there was undoubtedly a boredom quotient.

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The fraternities offered it all--fellowship and a series of earned initiations to ever deeper and more complex organizational secrets. Lending these near-occult degrees of ritual enlightenment an appropriate sense of mystery and magic was a job tailored for people possessed of theatrical and artistic skills.

Today, the results look pretty quaint. Back in the heyday of vaudeville, a trick like “Peter’s Ghost” must have been awesome. A large model set shows how a man standing on stage was made to appear to dissolve into his own skeleton. Right. It’s done with mirrors.

As initiates progressed, they were allowed to wear special costumes on ceremonial occasions. Among those on view are outfits resembling those of a medieval crusader, a biblical patriarch and something that looks like a London bobby’s regalia from about the 8th century. There’s an obligatory brace of swords, medals and prop coffins. Knights Templars in a group photo look rather scruffy, Napoleonic finery notwithstanding.

Numerically, the crowded show is dominated by framed watercolors. Many represent sets designed for Masonic pageantry, architecture and elaborate mausoleums. They’re constructed in sections representing various backdrops to create a sense of depth. Often quite handsome, they’re usually ascribed only to parent organizations such as Great Western Stage Equipment Co. Obviously, this art represents a collective effort.

In style and subject the work looks like a Pop Art extension of late salon-style European Romanticism, sharing that era’s fascination with death and the exotic past. Hades is represented as a cave with muscular damned souls, crocodiles and dinosaurs. Cyrus’ treasury looks like a harem without harem girls. The number of Egyptian temples suggests influence from the revivalist craze following the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922. Well, if we can build the Great Pyramid of Giza in Las Vegas, why not?

The retrospective tendency to view the fraternal boom in fairly humorous terms is reflected in a wall of cartoons and stills from movies such as Laurel and Hardy’s 1933 “Sons of the Desert.” Risibility is offset by reminders that Freemasonry had a long history before it was popularized. According to one display, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington were Masons.

The traveling exhibition was organized by Minneapolis’ Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum. Its guest curator was C. Lance Brockman, chairman of the University of Minnesota’s theater and dance department. He also edited the nice catalog, which is, unfortunately, sold out.

* Cal State Long Beach, University Art Museum, 1250 Bellflower Blvd., Long Beach; through Sunday, (562) 985-5761.