Picnic On The Grass

The latest Penguin Classics newsletter dropped into my mailbox this week, reminding me that "Picnic season has arrived. The countryside is alive with creaking hampers, popping Tupperware and clanking bottles. The usual rules of etiquette relax at a picnic, which allows for childish fun, young love and sometimes exquisite embarrassment."

It goes on to cite a series of literary picnics through the ages from Goldsmith's 'The Vicar of Wakefield', Jane Austen's 'Emma',  Tolstoy's 'Childhood' and Lewis Carroll's 'Alice...', to Joyce's 'Ulysses', even Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty Four' and Nabokov's 'Lolita'. 

I've read all of the above, and I must say those picnic episodes are not particularly firmly embedded in memory. So thank you, Penguin Classics, but I will be pursuing a more visual approach to the week's theme, taking Edouard Manet's famous 1863 composition 'Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe' (Luncheon on the grass) as a starting point to examine, in pastiche art representations, how the world and picnicking have changed through the years.

the original Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, painting by Edouard Manet, 1863

Manet's painting was rejected by the Paris Salon which refused to show it at their annual summer exhibition at the Académie des Beaux-Arts on the grounds of poor taste. They called it "scandalous", a ruling that merely served to generate interest in the painter and his painting, which considerably enhanced Manet's reputation. 

Originally titled 'Le Bain' (The Bath), Manet's provocative composition went on to become both critically acclaimed and world famous among the ranks of impressionist paintings. Some even see it as the beginning of Modern Art. He rendered several copies of it. The original is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris but there is also a version in London's Courtauld Gallery if you're interested.

Of course, cars didn't exist when Manet painted his picnic tableau. In those days, journeys to the Bois de Boulogne, supposedly where his scene was set, would have been by horse-drawn carriage (not shown). The first automobiles didn't materialise until the tail-end of the 19th century. However, by the 1930s they were a fairly common sight and so Robert Doisneau who, along with Henri Cartier-Bresson) was one of the leading photographers of the inter-war years, was happy to feature a couple of cars in his witty 1936 photo-homage.

Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, photograph by Robert Doisneau, 1936

No nudity this time, no lake and not a trace of bohemianism. Instead, a couple of happy and wholesome bourgeois families (with child) enjoying seemingly affluent times and a picnic of good wine, cheeses, bread and quiche on the grass in the woods near Paris. It is no coincidence that the car most obviously featured is a Renault, for among his other portfolio clients, Doisneau was the in-house photographer for the Renault car company. 

In hindsight, that image of peaceful prosperity and contentment gains a degree of ironic resonance for its naive innocence, given that within three years France and Europe would be plunged into the most destructive and terrible war. Doisneau unwittingly captured the calm before that storm.

After the war, Alain Jacquet (who had been born months before the outbreak of hostilities) emerged in the 1960s as a leading artist of the Nouvelle Figuration school in France, a movement that was allied to the US Pop Art brigade. Jacquet divided his time between New York and Paris and taught at the latter's École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. He was married to Sophie Matisse, great-granddaughter of the artist Henri Matisse.

Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, painting by Alain Jacquet, 1964

Jacquet was well-known for using motifs from older, famous paintings as a starting point for his subversive creations. He is perhaps most famous for his 'camouflage' series of pop art depictions of Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus', but he also chose to paint a mid-20th century take on Manet's famous outdoor luncheon party. 

It is much more precisely mannered than many of his paintings, closely reproducing Manet's posing of the three figures in the foreground. Of course, they are by a swimming pool, a fake lake, and any trees are relegated to the background, for this industrial-era American Dream is an altogether more sterile pastoral. Does it help to know that the two men featured are the Italian painter Mario Schifano and the French art critic Pierre Restany? Possibly not. Just for the record, the woman is Restany's wife, Jeannine de Goldschmidt, and the girl on the far side of the pool is her sister. For the picnic there is fruit, a knife and bread, but no wine. That loaf of sliced bread is in a packet bearing Jacquet's name.

The artist was an habitué of the bohemian Chelsea Hotel during his early stays in New York and left the owner a copy of the painting as settlement for his hotel bill.

Manet's painting continued to intrigue and inspire artists well into the 21st century. There are many picnic parodies and pastiches out there, cartoons, collages, film clips, paintings, photographs, even sculpted recreations. It's probably the second most re-invented image after the Mona Lisa. 

What is the abiding attraction? Is it the incongruity of the clothed and the undressed? That's possibly the strongest trigger. As for what the various depictions tell us about how civilisation progresses, I found this final image, a photographic representation from the covid years, quite a telling and rather depressing take.

Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, photograph by Le Tondeuse, 2020

It's almost a composite of 'Le déjeuner sur l'herbe' and the 'Birth of Venus' as Le Tondeuse (the lawnmower) presents a rather trashy take on theme. That's not much of a luncheon or picnic, mostly beer and coca cola and some cuts of cold meat. Two of the company are smoking and look bored, and two others are looking slightly uncomfortable, as if they are all trying to ignore the naked Venus posed behind them. Is this a picture of 21st century ennui and disconnection? At least there are trees. Thank goodness for the trees.

I really wanted to write a new poem to accompany today's blog but I'm down in London celebrating my oldest daughter's 40th birthday. We went to Vauxhall Park, though we didn't take a picnic. The ground is baked hard and the grass is a dried beige. So in lieu of something by me, here's another picnic poem by renowned American poet Amy Clampitt.  

A Hermit Thrush

Nothing's certain. Crossing, on this longest day,

the low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up 

 the scree-slope of what at high tide 

will be again an island, 

 to where, a decade since well-being staked 

 the slender, unpremeditated claim that brings us 

 back, year after year, lugging the 

 makings of another picnic— 

the cucumber sandwiches, the sea-air-sanctified 

fig newtons—there's no knowing what the slamming 

seas, the gales of yet another winter 

may have done. Still there, 

 the gust-beleaguered single spruce tree, 

 the ant-thronged, root-snelled moss, grass 

 and clover tuffet underneath it, 

 edges frazzled raw 

but, like our own prolonged attachment, holding. 

Whatever moral lesson might commend itself, 

there's no use drawing one, 

there's nothing here 

to seize on as exemplifying any so-called virtue 

(holding on despite adversity, perhaps) or 

any no-more-than-human tendency— 

stubborn adherence, say, 

to a wholly wrongheaded tenet. Though to 

hold on in any case means taking less and less 

for granted, some few things seem nearly 

certain, as that the longest day 

will come again, will seem to hold its breath, 

the months-long exhalation of diminishment 

again begin. Last night you woke me 

for a look at Jupiter, 

that vast cinder wheeled unblinking 

in a bath of galaxies. Watching, we traveled 

toward an apprehension all but impossible 

to be held onto— 

that no point is fixed, that there's no foothold 

but roams untethered save by such snells, 

such sailor's knots, such stays 

and guy wires as are 

mainly of our own devising. From such an 

empyrean, aloof seraphic mentors urge us 

to look down on all attachment, 

on any bonding, as 

in the end untenable. Base as it is, from 

year to year the earth's sore surface 

mends and rebinds itself, however 

and as best it can, with 

thread of cinquefoil, tendril of the magenta 

beach pea, trammel of bramble; with easings, 

mulchings, fragrances, the gray-green 

bayberry's cool poultice— 

and what can't finally be mended, the salt air 

proceeds to buff and rarefy: the lopped carnage 

of the seaward spruce clump weathers 

lustrous, to wood-silver. 

Little is certain, other than the tide that 

circumscribes us that still sets its term 

to every picnic—today we stayed too long 

again, and got our feet wet— 

and all attachment may prove at best, perhaps, 

a broken, a much-mended thing. Watching 

the longest day take cover under 

a monk's-cowl overcast, 

with thunder, rain and wind, then waiting, 

we drop everything to listen as a 

hermit thrush distills its fragmentary, 

hesitant, in the end 

unbroken music. From what source (beyond us, or 

the wells within?) such links perceived arrive— 

diminished sequences so uninsistingly 

not even human—there's 

hardly a vocabulary left to wonder, uncertain 

as we are of so much in this 

existence, this botched, cumbersome, much-mended,

not unsatisfactory thing.

                                                          Amy Clampitt (1920-1994(

a detail from Raphael's Judgement of Paris, 1510

By the way, even Manet's composition for 'Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe' is based on a section in the bottom right hand quadrant of Raphael's 'Judgement Of Paris'. 

Thanks for reading, S ;-)