In 1938, Andre Breton and Jacqueline Lambda visited Trotsky, who was living in exile in Mexico City. Also present but not in the photos was Trotsky’s wife Natalia Sedova and Freda Kahlo. When not picnicking, Trotsky worked with Rivera, Breton, and Lambda to...
Exiled in Mexico City, Trotsky and his wife, Natalia, loved to picnic. It was one means of enjoying a sense of freedom, though he was guarded even them. James T. Farrell writes, “At the picnic, Trotsky and Natalia went off to walk in the woods in opposite directions....
Cartier-Bresson is noted for his quick images taken as they happen. His1952 book on photography, The Decisive Moment, is a more elegant translation of the French title Images à la sauvette, Images on the Sly. Sunday on the Marne captures the spontaneity of a picnic....
Persephone’s abduction by Hades, sometimes Pluto, is rife with sexual predation and seasonal change. In Theogony, Hesiod says that while gathering asphodels with the daughters of Oceanus, Persephone is abducted and taken to Hades, where she rules as the Iron Queen....
Following Cronin’s, The Citadel, Vidor understands how central the picnic episode is for exploring how success and money distort the lives of Andrew and Elizabeth Manson. Once idealistic, Dr. Andrew Manson has gone over to the dark side, considering money more...
A hodge-podge of wordplay. Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939), links picnics with lust. You won’t need be lonesome, Lizzy my love, when your beau gets his glut of cold meat and hot soldiering or wake in winter, window machree, but snore sung in my old Balbriggan surtout....
When the WPA commissioned Rummler, Works Project Administration, to paint a mural for Norwalk’s City Hall, his preferred topic was picnicking at Calf Pasture Beach. It was a favorite town locale and an emblem of Norwalk’s community’s spirit. The...
The Day of the Locust may have been the best novel ever written about Hollywood, but Nathanael West and his publisher Random House miscalculated. They believed a biting satire of the film industry and its insidious confusion of illusion and reality would sell, but it...
Wolcott’s tables for St. Thomas’s Church picnic is similar to Nell Choate Jones’s 1945 Church Supper but differ from William Clary’s picnic on the grounds in Valentines, Virginia. See Marion Post Wolcott. Table in picnic grove set for St. Thomas Church supper near...
Rackham’s final project was a set of illustrations for Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. He was suffering from rheumatism and dying of cancer. Yet, he completed a series of twelve scenes, two of which are of Ratty and Mole’s picnic on the...