Sans Waterlilies: An American Impressionist Landscape A MONA Moment By Ron Roth Director Museum of Nebraska Art

There is a small village in France, in a forest named Fontainebleau. In this village, named Barbizon, something happened in the early years of the 19th Century, which changed the course of the history of art.

In retrospect, it seems so simple, so obvious a thing. Yet at the time, it was revolutionary, and flew in the face of centuries of accepted, artistic practice. Without this adjustment in outlook, this seemingly modest change in practice, we could quite possibly be less what was perhaps the most successful art movement in a hundred years, a movement which bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, and continues as a powerful force in art. We know it as Impressionism.

So what happened in this small French village which shook the world of art? The artists there began to paint out of doors. The art historical term is plein air, translated, "in the open". These Barbizon artists--Millet, Corot, Rousseau, Daubigny--sought to portray nature not just as backdrops for scenes from classic mythology or epic, historical events. These artists looked at nature as a "living, dynamic force in her own right," as described by art historian Mervyns Levy.

For the first time in history, we see a group of artists of the first rank study and explore the effects of light, weather, atmosphere, and how you recreate these effects on canvas. Light. What the artist Rousseau called the "secret of Prometheus."

Enter the French Impressionists. These artists took the final leap into the 20th century sensibility, by short-circuiting the subject matter of the painting in favor of light and color. Monet and company suggested the radical notion that it didn't really matter whether we were looking water lilies or city boulevards, what mattered, was color.

Hanging in the front hall of my home is a landscape by a contemporary artist who works in a painterly, impressionistic style--Omaha, Nebraska native Stephen Dinsmore. You can see this painting on MONA's website at monet.unk.edu/mona. It is a landscape in late fall, or early winter. There is a light covering of snow in the foreground that supports a horizontal band of color in the center of the canvas. The left and right wings of this band of color are copses of dark green firtrees. They screen a background of vivid oranges, reds and ochre hues, which flare intensely in the open area between the firtrees. These colors are the more intensified by their proximity to the complementary green of the trees.

But what I find most satisfying about this work is the more subtle effects of color and light that Dinsmore explores. That large bank of snow in the foreground I mentioned has a barely perceptible yellow/orange cast to it. These pale highlights are resting comfortably on a translucent cushion of pale pink, at the bottom of the frame. This pink echoes the breath of light pink that glows in the sky in the upper half of the painting.

It is these subtle hues of pink and yellow which are for me, the most exciting and dynamic element of this painting. Throughout the day, as the light changes and modulates in our front hall, these colors change as well. The painting is not static. As the sun rises outside, it rises also over this landscape. What was once a pale hint of pink in the sky slowly transforms into a violet pastel. And below it, a mysterious purple begins to vibrate sympathetically from the scrub brush below.

These are colors you will never see except from the palette of a gifted artist like Dinsmore. An artist, a modern day Impressionist who understands light, and and how it transforms our perception of color.