Warhol’s Picnic is an early work that lacks the pizazz of the later Pop paintings of the late 1960s. Featured Image: Andy Warhol. Picnic (1955c.), watercolor, ink, gouache on paper.
Allen’s Rubbish Dump is the closest to a spiritual picnic I know of. Christ’s stunning appearance in a wasteland suggests life without beauty when industry pollutes the environment. It is unclear if the roiling clouds are suggesting an approaching...
The neat phrase “picnic, lightning” is a metaphor for transience and happenstance written by Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Lolita (1955). Awaiting a murder trial, Humbert begins a memoir, freely admitting moral decline and obsession with the...
David Dodge and Alfred Hitchcock had differing views on the character of John Robie, aka The Cat, and the hero of To Catch a Thief. Dodge disguised the thirty-four-year-old to look older and plumper; for his film, Hitchcock chose fifty-one-year-old Cary Grant to play...
Anderson series of Idylls are picnicky, filled with people happily dancing and singing on the grass. He called the first Bacchanal and the other Idylls. In an interview, Anderson referenced Matisse’s Luxe, Calme et Volupté as a modern arcadian idyll but does not...
Picasso’s social contacts in Antibes and Juan-les-Pins were varied. Among his American friends were Gerald and Sara Murphy, who rented Villa America in La Garoupe. At that time, Picasso was married to Olga Khokhlova, a ballet dancer. In 1955, Picasso began a...
Newby’s Picnic At Sakkara is a comic novel set during political and international turmoil in Egypt. At the time of Newby’s action around 1946-47, the British were still in control of the Suez Canal, the Farouk regime was wobbling, and Egyptian nationalism led by the...
David’s books are suffused with references to picnics. She could be informal or according to her whims, something she adopted from her youth, which she wrote about in Summer Cooking, “Picnic addicts [like herself] seem to be roughly divided between those...
With Daniel Taradash’s screenplay, Logan’s Picnic departs radically from the drama, which does not have a picnic. Inge’s play skips the Picnic as Hal Carter and Madge Owens move to make love, and the curtain falls. Logan directed the Broadway...
King’s Carousel “A Real Nice Clambake” is full of picnicky camaraderie and good spirits, but it takes a nose-dive when the news comes that Julie Jordan’s lover Billy Bigelow, botched robbery is dead. King is casual about having the actors...
Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Johnson’s film strongly solidified the character of Tom Wrath as a symbol of mid-twentieth Century America, the rising generation of white, well-educated men striving for wealth and power in mid-century 19th...
Ernest Hemingway thought Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was trash. However, Americans still readjusting to World War Two and its aftermath thought made it a best-seller. Within a year of publication, Nunnally Johnson directed a faithful film...
The picnic episode is the eye of a romantic hurricane in which two might-be lovers, Marylee Hadley and Mitch Wayne, are momentarily at ease. Marylee chooses the picnic ground because it’s where she and Mitch played and picnicked when they were teenagers. She remembers...
Fisher sets rules for picnics in stone. In “The Pleasures of Picnics,” she declares people who do not like picnics must be “dismissed immediately.” Fisher’s “true” picnic (and maybe yours?) must be outdoors and away from home....
The Sleep-Tite company picnic is the musical centerpiece of Abbott and Donen’s The Pajama Game and is a reworking of Bissell’s 7 ½ Cents, for which he wrote the screenplay. Once a year, company management and union employees meet on common ground to...
The picnic in Dick’s Eye in the Sky is characteristic of his style of mixing shifting planes of reality and illusion, laced with sardonic humor. The picnic takes when the real world collides accidentally with an alternate world it’s the result of an...
Sirk’s Interlude is ninety minutes of adultery that ends when Helen says, “We have no chance. It’s impossible,” and Tonio replies, “You are right.” Salzburg is all sunshine when Tonio takes Helen for a picnic in his red...
No food. Diners sit at long tables waiting. Spencer said he forgot it, but this seems disingenuous and intentionally humorous because it defies the expectation that a picnic will include abundant food and drink. See Stanley Spencer. Dinner on the Hotel Lawn (1956-57)....
When Aaron Schuman asked Klein if he dreamed in black and white, Klein shot back, “In black and white, of course.” But his photograph Tatiana + Marie Rose + Camels, Morocco, he had it both ways. Featured Image: William Klein. Tatiana + Marie Rose + Camels, Morocco,...
Popeye, Olive Oyl, Wimpy, and Swee’pea picnic on the back of a whale. Ha! ha! See Crosby Newell. Popeye Goes on a Picnic. Illustrated by Bud Sagendorf. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1958
