Keith Jacobshagen, famed prairie painter, finds essential and eternal in endless Nebraska sky – Flatwater Free Press

Several days each week for more than 50 years, Keith Jacobshagen got behind the wheel and drove into the countryside around his home in Lincoln, to look, to experience, to think and, most importantly, to draw and paint.

“I could not stay away from going out there and being absorbed into the space and the light and the landscape,” he said. “So it was a real lure to me that was strong.”

Unlike other landscape artists who capture obvious scenic glories of crashing ocean waves or snow-crested mountains, Jacobshagen has devoted his life to depicting what much of the rest of America calls flyover country and ignores: cornfields, treelines, grain elevators and vast, unimpeded skies. 

For decades, he has been one of Nebraska’s best-known artists with works featured in scores of exhibitions across the state and the U.S. He has gained renown nationally as a chronicler of the Great Plains, with work featured in two influential museum shows that traveled the country.

“I really regard Keith as the most significant Plains or prairie painter today or then,” said the

exhibition’s curator, Joni Kinsey, “and he seemed to be doing more monumental works, and I don’t mean in terms of size but in terms of significance, that were truly in the category of sublime. His work just stood out.”

Now 84 years old and in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s disease, Jacobshagen is facing the reality that his painting days are largely behind him. 

He is content to look back at what he calls a very satisfying career in which he produced more than 2,000 paintings, not to mention hundreds more drawings and original prints.

From May 15 through Aug. 16, he will be spotlighted in a solo show, “The Shape of the Prairie,” at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in St. Joseph, Mo. And the Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearney is tentatively planning a Jacobshagen retrospective in 2027 that curator Karissa Johnson hopes will tour at least regionally and include an accompanying scholarly catalog.

Jacobshagen’s works have a singular look – a low horizon line with sometimes only loosely delineated features across the landscape and big, sweeping skies – delicate white clouds against a panorama of blue or the orange and slate gray of a sunset turning into night.

“Once you see a Jacobshagen, you wouldn’t mistake it for anyone else’s work,” said David Cateforis, a professor of art history at the University of Kansas. “He has a very distinctive style.”

The elevated point of view came from being a pilot. When he was in his teens, the Wichita, Kansas, native learned to fly from his father, who was a test pilot for Boeing during World War II. 

As an adult, Jacobshagen would sometimes rent and fly planes and gliders around Lincoln for fun.

“Every time I’d get back in one piece,” he said, “I just felt grateful for getting to do that, to mix both my affection for the landscape in terms of drawing and painting in it and in terms of flying over it.”

Although Jacobshagen’s landscapes are rooted in specific times and places, his skies often verge into abstract-expressionism, with his gestural, free-spirited deployment of color and patterns.

In previous eras, landscape artists often felt compelled to fill up their compositions, but in keeping with her notion of “plain pictures” with its clever dual reference to the Plains and uncluttered scenes, Kinsey, a professor emerita in art history at the University of Iowa, argues that Jacobshagen avoids that approach.

“He’s got maybe grain elevators or other structures,” she said, “but they are so tiny that they don’t dominate, and what he allows to dominate is the vista – the flat horizon and sweeping sky, and definitely there is almost a kind of (Mark) Rothko effect.”

While he certainly knows well the centuries-long history of landscape painting, Jacobshagen has always made a point of keeping up with the ever-changing pulse of the art world. For years, he’d spend a week or two each summer in New York City viewing dozens of gallery and museum exhibitions. 

It is this balance of past and present, of abstraction and realism, that gives his pieces a contemporary quality.

But Cateforis believes that like the great 18th- and 19th-century English landscape painter John Constable, the Nebraska artist is of his time but also manages to transcend it. “There is a sense of something that is kind of essential and eternal that Keith is finding in these humble Midwestern landscapes,” the art historian said.

Jacobshagen was born in Kansas in 1941 and has spent his entire life within a three-state area, nearly all of it in the Great Plains, the vast region of grasslands that stretches from Canada all the way south to Texas.

He first fell in love with the Plains landscape as a child, when he peered out the car window as he rode with his mother to airfields outside of Wichita to pick up his father from work. “There was something magical about what was around me that I somehow knew as special to me,” he said.

He went on to earn his bachelor’s degree from the Kansas City Art Institute and his master’s degree at the University of Kansas, where he studied with Robert Sudlow, a noted landscape painter who Jacobshagen called a “huge influence.”

The two would venture into rural areas around Lawrence and set up their easels 10 to 25 feet apart. He vividly recalls Sudlow yelling out in excitement as a change in light or some other natural phenomenon was occurring: “Geez, look at that blue!”

Jacobshagen would continue this practice throughout his career. He traveled into the landscape as often as five days a week, depending on his schedule at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he taught from 1968 through his retirement in 2008.

Before heading out in the morning, he would sit with a cup of coffee and look over aeronautical charts he used for flying or regular road maps.Sometimes, an intriguing town name like Rokeby or Saltillo or an unusual arrangement of a group of lakes would catch his eye. “Those kinds of things lured me out there like the sirens,” he said with a laugh.

He sometimes brought an easel with him, painting for two or three hours at whatever site he’d chosen and roughing out perhaps half of a composition. Then he’d finish it in his studio, relying on Polaroid photos he had taken at the same time and his memory.

Other times, he used orange, 5-by-7½-inch engineering notebooks to make sketches or jot down notes about the weather conditions or time of day, factoids that can sometimes even be found written in small letters along some of his drawings and  small paintings.

“So, there is a specificity to his work at the same time there is a universality to it, and that again adds interesting layers of complexity,” Cateforis said.

For Jacobshagen, just taking in the landscape was as important as the final art work. “Being out there and absorbing the light and the temperature and the lovely sounds that go on out there and the terrific smells of a freshly turned field,” he said. “There is nothing better.”

Many of Jacobshagen’s drawings and paintings are small, but he has created larger-scale works as well, including “Crow Call (Near the River),” a twilight scene that measures about 4 feet tall and 6½ feet wide.

That panoramic piece was acquired in 1991 by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., and it was featured for a time on a postcard available in the institution’s shop. 

It is not on view now but has hung in a place of honor in the museum director’s office since 2018.

“I got very charged up when I made that painting,” the artist said. “I made a lot of personal discoveries about how I was thinking of the process of painting.”

The big question surrounding Jacobshagen is legacy. In addition to his many exhibitions, he was represented by several New York galleries, including the prestigious, now-defunct Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, and he has works in more than 50 museum and corporate collections across the country. 

But is that enough for him to be remembered in 50 or 100 years?

“I hope so,” Kinsey said. “I definitely hope so, because I think he has been all along one of the more astute artists of this distinctive landscape, and there are not a lot of them.”

It doesn’t help that Jacobshagen was not included in a 2019 book titled “Landscape Painting Now,” which featured more than 80 artists, or that his works are not in the collections of major museums like the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York or Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Also working against him are the art world’s continuing coastal biases and lack of understanding and appreciation of the Plains landscape. That’s something that the influential 1996 show “Plain Pictures” strived to counter. Jacobshagen’s work was included in the exhibition, which opened at the University of Iowa Museum of Art and traveled to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and Omaha’s own Joslyn Art Museum. One of Jacobshagen’s paintings was featured on the cover of the show’s catalog.

But the reality remains: Landscape painting has never been at the forefront of 20th or 21st century art.

What’s not in question is the mastery of Jacobshagen’s work itself, which Cateforis believes has the transcendent quality that can match the great Dutch masters. “There is a sense of calm and serenity but also a sense of supreme accomplishment in the way he renders the sky, the land and the elements of the landscape,” he said. “There is a quiet assurance in the work.”

While the upcoming show in St. Joseph and the other planned by the Museum of Nebraska Art are important, what would significantly help Jacobshagen’s chances for a more lasting place in art history is a touring retrospective organized by a larger, more prominent institution. 

That may happen, or it may not, but the artist himself professes to give little thought to his legacy. 

He is sure of one thing: He has no regrets.

“Oh, no, none,” he said without hesitation. “I am content.”