The Remains of the Day: Paul Otero's Portrait of Leonard Thiessen A MONA Moment By Ron Roth Director Museum of Nebraska Art

His posture is drawn up and stiffened with the angular fragility of the elderly. Or is it the mesmerizing inertia of a preying mantis? In this portrait of Leonard Thiessen by Omaha artist Paul Othero, Thiessen chest, arms and hands are locked in a posture so arch, so individualized, it is one of the compelling features of the painting. Here is Richard the III with his malignly, humped back. The buckled cone of his upper torso surrounds a torrent of disarming power, emanating from his eyes.

Thiessen was perhaps the single most influential Nebraska artist of the Twentieth Century. As artist, writer and arts leader, he was, for those who knew him, bigger than life. Few contemporary portraits distill personality so intensely, or are so evocative of allusions as this. We experience a chill as we look at Thiessen, or better, as he looks at us. Here sits an intellectual predator, unsentimentally probing his way into our psyche, boring inexorably into the heart of our character. It is this sense of the unsparing drive of instinct summoned up by the eerie intersection of body language and Mephisto glare which is so evocative in this portrait.

The orange/umber filter of color and its glossy sheen which pervades the coloration of the canvas suggests one of those elegant prisons of amber, encasing a prehistoric wasp, its stinger outsized and intact, ageless and ambient. Or, is that orange cast the reflection of the flames of hell, our larger than life Thiessen his curved fingers curled around the the dying embers of a cigarette like the line of a scythe, death's awaiting messenger? The religious overtones are perhaps suggested by the unadorned window opening over his shoulder, a view in the style a quattro cento landscape, a part of the pattern of an early Renaissance religious scene.

I like better a different kind of allusion: that of a powerful personality in twilight. The deep orange perhaps better characterized as the rich, golden tinged remains of the day at sunset. Thiessen's powerful and charismatic personality alive in amber, in memory, set in semi-precious stone.