Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind (1939)

Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind (1939)

Arriving at Twelve Oaks garden party, Gerald O’Hara is pleased to say, “Well, John Wilkes, it’s a grand day you’ll be havin’ for the barbecue.” It’s momentous because it is the beginning of Scarlett and Rhett Butler’s...
Victor Fleming’s The Wizard ofOz (1939)

Victor Fleming’s The Wizard ofOz (1939)

Fleming’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz omits Baum’s picnic episode. Dorothy’s wicker is meant only to carry Toto. See Victor Fleming. The Wizard of Oz (1939). Screenplay by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf is based on L. Frank...
Sam Wood’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)

Sam Wood’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)

Wood’s romantic picnic on a mountain in Goodbye, Mr. Chips is his idea. James Hilton’s Charles Chipping and Katherine Ellis meet while hiking in the Lake District, fall “head over heels in love,” and marry soon after. Wood sets the mountain...
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...
Louis Le Brocquy’s A Picnic (1940)

Louis Le Brocquy’s A Picnic (1940)

Le Brocquy’s second wife, Anne Madden, remembers that the model in A Picnic was a friend. She preferred not to remember the woman in black and white (next to the umbrella) is Le Brocquy’s first wife, Jane Stoney. (She’s the same pensive woman in the portrait The Woman...
Zelda Fitzgerald’s A Mad Tea Party (1940s)

Zelda Fitzgerald’s A Mad Tea Party (1940s)

It’s unpicnicky. A Mad Tea-Party is agitated and foreboding, perhaps suggesting Fitzgerald’s unfulfilled (unrealistic) desire to become a ballet dancer. Despite the allusion to Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, this tea party is without humor.  If Fitzgerald is Alice,...
Beauford Delaney’s  The Picnic (1940) and Distant Horizons (1952)

Beauford Delaney’s The Picnic (1940) and Distant Horizons (1952)

Delaney‘s paintings during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s were figurative. Over time, he shifted to abstraction during his life in Paris in the 1950s. Both The Picnic and Distant Horizons are no-food picnics. Featured Image: The Picnic. Oil on canvas....