Leon Trotsky and friend’s picnic in Mexico City (1938)

Leon Trotsky and friend’s picnic in Mexico City (1938)

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....
Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Sunday on the Marne  (1938)

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Sunday on the Marne (1938)

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....
Thomas Hart Benton’s Persephone (1938)

Thomas Hart Benton’s Persephone (1938)

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....
King Vidor’s The Citadel (1938)

King Vidor’s The Citadel (1938)

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...
James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939)

James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939)

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....
Alexander Rummler’s Calf Pasture Beach (1939-1941c.)

Alexander Rummler’s Calf Pasture Beach (1939-1941c.)

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...
Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust (1939)

Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust (1939)

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...