ARTS IN AMERICA; Home on the Range, With Drive-Ins and Gas Stations (may require subcription)

New York Times by Elizabeth Heilmann Brooke | Jan 26, 2000

In his battered, treasured copy of ''American Light: The Luminist Movement 1850-1875,'' the realist landscape painter Don Stinson has tucked a few snapshots beside Albert Bierstadt's ''Storm in the Mountains.'' One features a cloudless blue sky and an immense vertical metal screen: a drive-in movie theater. And there is a pair of photos taped together to record a big Western sky and a four-door sedan on a road leading away from a snow-streaked Rocky Mountain range.