The Great Outdoors 

Harper's Bazaar
2021

In Giovanni Bellini and Titian’s The Feast of the Gods (1514/1529), a sprawling Renaissance oil painting, it is easy to become lost among the minutiae of gesture. Seventeen mythological figures—an assortment of nymphs and ancient gods, including Apollo and Neptune—are gathered in a shaded, mossy area, arranged in various states of repose. A goddess kneels, clutching a pearlescent quince as though about to take a bite. Her arm is wrapped around the shoulder of a sitting lover as his fingers slip between her thighs. Around the pair, others sip casually from gold-rimmed cups and silvery bowls, hold instruments or balance vessels atop their heads. A man steadies a donkey with one hand and jug with the other, while the laurel-wreathed youth below him sneaks wine from a cask.

As the figures turn toward and away from one another, they create a visual symphony of sorts, cleverly directing our gaze across the canvas as we follow the lines of their forms. Resting limbs become arrows. Draped clothing slips in just the right places, exposing pert breasts (convenient!) or connecting scenic elements. Our eyes pause longer at the right corner, where Priapus (a Greek god known for his outsized member) slyly lifts the skirt of a sleeping woman. Right there, when we’re at risk of leaving the frame, we see the tree trunk she’s snoozing on. It bends inward, pulling our eyes back in toward the action. With all its subtle emotion, its humanizing of the gods, Bellini’s last great painting dazzles, even now. It’s hard to turn away.

There’s another reason this work delights: it revolves around a picnic. Easily the defining social event of our post-lockdown era, picnics hold enduring appeal—for their casualness, easy abundance, for novelty of being in intimate company while also on public view. Bellini depicts all of this centuries before we had a name for it: the word picnic didn’t appear in English until 1748, deriving from the French pique-nique, first printed in 1692. And yet, the key elements are here: a group captured against pleasant scenery, having traveled with the express purpose of sharing a meal, in the daytime, outdoors. According to art historian George Holmes, Bellini’s is “the picture of the ideal mythical Mediterranean idyll, made up of charming people enjoying themselves in a landscape blessed by the Mediterranean sun.”

The painting was commissioned by Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, in Northern Italy. He’d asked many famous artists to produce new works for a room within his castle. These works were to be private pleasures, created for the Duke’s amusement; even with their historical and mythical riffs, they were designed to entertain. It’s not surprising then that Bellini included sly references to the lasciviousness of courtly society: hands grasping, eyes undressing one another, flesh hidden and revealed. Of course, he wasn’t the only one to frame the picnic as a site of erotic potential. Take Édouard Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass, made between 1862-63. In the wooded, rural scene, a nude female sits with two fully dressed men, legs apart and crotch turned to face them. She is gazing at the viewer with a half-smile, brazenly unclad. In the foreground is a tilted picnic basket, peaches and cherries spilling out onto hastily removed clothing. In the background: a barely dressed (by 1800s standards) bather bends over, revealing her exposed back and bare arm. It’s not exactly clear what’s happening or how the figures relate to one another. In any case, the scene was too lewd for French critics; its subjects too horny and content in their hedonism. Manet’s luncheon is as much about imbibing and eating as other types of devouring: lusting and looking and exhibitionism, all beneath dappled light.

The promise of sex is everywhere in the canon of picnic imagery. Present too, is moneyed whiteness. It revels, with apparent unconcern, in lush, verdant greenery. It is irreverent, unchallenged, delighted by—and in harmony with—the natural world. In Kerry James Marshall’s Past Times (1997), part of the Alabama-born painter’s Garden Project series, idealized picnicking tableaux are reimagined, this time with Blackness at the center. Marshall’s figures, outfitted in country club whites, pursue suburban avocations with nonchalant ease: they drive boats, swing golf clubs and croquet mallets, and lounge around on checkered blankets, wicker baskets at the ready. Blackness here, the curator Helen Molesworth observes, is not an afterthought but a “radical presence”. It’s present, too, in Tyler Mitchell’s Riverside Scene (2021), a painting that’s actually a photograph. The composition recalls Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-86), where the bourgeoisie amble happily along banks of the Seine in France. In Mitchell’s spacious landscape—actually his home state of Georgia—youthful men climb into muddy water, treading carefully, gently, through high grass and yellow flowers. An older bespeckled woman smiles at her companions, who share her picnic rug, while others recline contentedly on vinyl-tube lawn chairs. In the distance, a woman paints at an easel, beyond her, there’s a mother and child. Time is slowed down in this secluded place; there’s no rush to be anywhere else. Mitchell’s figures are unhurried, as they should be.

Closer to home, Kudjila and Gangalu artist Daniel Boyd has also been climbing inside traditional Western picnic imagery, walking around and readjusting elements as he sees fit. His 2020 painting Untitled (TBOMB) depicts a kids’ birthday picnic writ as large and breathtaking as a history painting, its anonymous, impressionistic figures hanging balloons in trees or gathering in clusters to play show and tell. The scene is familiar in its casualness and its scrubby bushland setting, yet Boyd’s method belies more complex layers. The artist paints with oils, then overlays archival glue dots (a nod to both Aboriginal dot-painting techniques, and to pointillism). He then blackens the image outside of the glue, so only the dots remain. It’s a smart approach to historical revisionism: only when we see what has been scrubbed out, what is lost, can we understand the whole image.

In certain picnic-themed artworks, humans shrink to a suggestion; their presence implied but never overwhelming. Think Yuli Yamagata’s PicNic (2019). The cartoonish grouping includes a tangle of fingers made of stuffed lycra with blue talons, an ear-shaped ashtray and cigarette, and an elongated banana-like form, all strewn atop a fabric scrap blanket. Or A Picnic at Strawberry Hill (1983), a collage-and-watercolor by the Australian surrealist James Gleeson, in which the landscape is alien, and the sole human has their back to us. Charred and strewn with bumps that mimic the moon’s surface, dead volcanoes and impact craters, Gleeson’s blackened earth is both sacred and unsettling, stretched out below an orange sky. In the distance is a supersized strawberry, big as a mountain: a symbol of sweetness that can’t last. Like all picnics, especially the ones we’re now attending, his fruit is alive with promise. It invites us to chase it, taste it while we can, before the fantasy is gone.