Dancing Down the River A MONA Moment By Ron Roth Director Museum of Nebraska Art

The lore, of the great rivers--the Missouri, the Mississippi--winds its way through the work of American writers and visual artists. Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and George Caleb Bingham saw in these vast waterways the lifeblood of the American character, of the American drama.

"The great Mississippi," It wrote Twain. "The majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the other side, the 'point' above the town, and the 'point' below bounding the river glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one."

One of Nebraska's own artists, Plattsmouth native John Falter, catches the romance and reality of the flatboatmen in his painting, Dancing Down the River, a painting in the collection of the Museum of Nebraska Art. It is representative of the work Falter produced as an illustrator for the covers of The Saturday Evening Post, Look, Esquire and Reader's Digest.

Here is a flatboat, or keelboat, floating on a dead calm Missouri, the streaming heat of mid-day suggested by a dull haze blanketing the river as it recedes into the distance to the right. A canvas tarp shades a harmonica player, a fiddler with a top hat and banjo player sit on a barrel play a tune: Turkey in the Straw, Skip to Ma Lou perhaps. Between them a lanky suspendered mate taps out some steps on the deck.

Despite the enthusiasm, there is a static quality to the painting. The musicians and dancer seem strangely inert--as if the oppressive humidity compels limited movement, a cramped jig the outside limit of exertion. The color range is limited as well, by design. Browns and grays dominate the palette, muddy and indistinct colors, the colors of river life. We view the flatboat from above, as if perched on a limb of a tree overhanging the edge of the river. This perspective provides a panoramic view of the deck and some realistic details, thumbnail suggestions of the particulars of every day life on the boat: a fishing net thrown over the side; a cat curled up on the top of a barrel; a carpet bag stowed in the corner of the stem.

Like his colleague Norman Rockwell, realistic rendering of the scene is exceptional, the draughtmanship impeccable. He uses classic and virtuoso technique to stage depth, the deep distance of the river as it fades into the sky. There are clear boundaries to the foreground, middle ground and background defined by color, shading and volume. They lead our eyes into the distance, to that "brilliant and lonely sea" Twain describes.

The foreground is dominated by the boat and the men and the dance, but Falter leads us left to a man in a Bowler hat holding a pole over the far side of the boat. Above him, in the middle ground, we are led to the dense, darkened forest of the shore line and its reflection below in the water, its far edge clearly dividing the middle and background of the painting into a drama of dark and light. Jutting out to the center of the composition, it pushes our eyes rightward into the diaphanous shoreline in the far distance, the distance defined by the translucent haze which lightens and covers it. Its right edge points our eyes into that farthest reach of the river our eyes can comprehend, that far bend in the river, so still, brilliant and lonely.

The circle of our eye's movement is complete and it falls back into the deck of the boat. The mundane, the stifling heat, and the monotony of life on the river is palpable, broken for a moment by a dance on the fore deck, and the yearning romance of the distant light beyond, there, in the far bend in the river.