What’s to be done after a long night of love-making? Go on a picnic, of course. Eastwood’s picnic setup in Bridges of Madison County is stagy: a cloth on the grass, a cooler, oranges (never peeled), and apples (never eaten). Coca-Cola (never opened)....
Hercules Protecting the Balance Between Pleasure and Virtue is Ligare’s allusion to Dürer’s Hercules at the Crossroads (1498c.). What Dürer implies, Ligare makes emphatic. His essential change is the picnic. He shows no food; instead, Ligare places Pleasure on a blue...
Piedmont, West Virginia, where Gates spent his youth, was a segregated town where most of the inhabitants worked at a Westvaco paper mill. Though Gates looks fondly at the company picnic scheduled to close in 1969 or 1970, the event is bittersweet. It’s...
This picnic has some personal allusion. But what that is stumping me. Featured Image: William Kentridge. My Dear Friend (He That Fled His Fate). Screenprint (1994) See: entry for Kentridge’s Picnic Panic
Vettriano’s Elegy for the Dead Admiral is a beach picnic on the sand at the surf’s edge. A woman in red sits with her back to the viewer facing the sea. She is serenaded by two violinists and served by a waiter. The situation alludes to the death of the...
Austen knows how to ruin a picnic, as she does in Sense and Sensibility. Ang Lee and his screenwriter Emma Thompson get the disappointment right. But then invent an original picnic to make up for Austen’s to mitigate the Dashwood family’s letdown. Critics...
Wood ants ruin a picnic in Angels & Insects. It’s a comic episode adapted from A.S. Byatt’s novella, Morpho Eugenia, a novella about predatory deception among the English gentry. Taking advantage of Midsummer’s Day, the Alabaster family settles...
Harvest Celebration demonstrates a satirical view of Soviet rigidity and social realism and embraces sexuality and lascivious behavior for fun. The subject is a send-up of the farm collective as an agricultural paradise pictured in official Soviet art, such as Feodor...
Suggested contemporary picnic fare for jane Austen includes many dishes requiring extensive preparation. We know who does the eating, but who does the prepping and the cooking? Broccoli (served hot or cold) Salmagundi Oysters, Stewed and in Loaves A Pretty Dish of...
Inspired by Giovanni Bellini’s The Feast of the Gods, Lorenza De’ Medici created this menu forth Artist’s Table (1995). De Medici promises foods are full of the flavor of the Renaissance. But it’s difficult to imagine Bellini or his patrons...
