labels - des moines art center

Caroline Armington Canadian, 1875–1939

Porte d’entrée, Cluny, Paris

(Entrance to the Palace of the Abbot of Cluny, Paris), 1911

Etching on paper

Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections; Gift of Carl Weeks, 1954.116

Born in Brampton, Ontario, Caroline Wilkinson Armington first studied art in Toronto.

In 1900, she went to Paris to study at the Académie Julian, a private art school that

was popular with foreign artists and that accepted women. In 1905, she and her

husband, the painter Frank Armington, settled permanently in Paris. A gifted

observer and productive printmaker, Caroline Armington achieved commercial

success, creating over 500 etchings of Gothic churches, picturesque medieval

streets, bridges, and other European architectural monuments.

Typically, Armington’s manner of drawing suggests the lightness and immediacy

of a sketch. For example, in Porte d’entrée, Cluny, the image does not quite reach

the edges of the plate. Her print reveals the continuing influence of James McNeill

Whistler (1834–1903), who, with his sketchy etching style, rejected the traditional

approach of fully-finished rectangular compositions. Whistler’s manner dominated

printmaking well beyond 1911. Caroline Armington’s style remained linked to the late

19th-century and would not evolve in response to more radical developments

pioneered by her contemporaries.

In Porte d’entrée, Cluny, Paris, 1911, a flamboyantly arched doorway opens on to

the courtyard of the Parisian residence of the abbots of the Benedictine abbey of

Cluny in Burgundy, a monastery in eastern France. During the Middle Ages, the

abbey of Cluny was the richest and most powerful of French monastic

establishments. The Cluny palace in Paris is one of the most important surviving

residences of Gothic architecture.

During the 1920s and ’30s, Caroline Armington’s etchings helped spread the

enthusiasm for Gothic art. In 1924, a traveling exhibition of both Armingtons’ work

came to Des Moines. Local collectors, such as Carl Weeks, the cosmetics magnate

who built the Gothic-style Salisbury House mansion in Des Moines, and who was

the donor of this print, purchased some of her works. At the time of her exhibition,

Armington donated 20 of her etchings to the Des Moines Association of Fine Arts.

During the 1940s, the Association transferred its collection to the new Des Moines

Art Center.

Émile-Antoine Bourdelle French, 1861–1929

Torso of the Figure Called Fruit, 1911

Bronze

Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections; Gift of James S. and

Dorothy Schramm, 1973.29

Born in southeastern France, Bourdelle arrived in Paris in 1885 when he was

awarded a scholarship to study at the École des beaux-arts. In 1893, Auguste Rodin

(1840–1917) admired Bourdelle’s sculpture and invited him to work in his studio,

where for many years, Bourdelle served as Rodin’s teaching assistant. Bourdelle’s

works of the 1880s and ’90s have much in common with Rodin’s highly expressive

forms, sculpted in a manner that suggests matter coming into being out of

formlessness. Around 1900, Bourdelle became interested in the simpler, more

flattened, and attenuated forms of archaic Greek sculpture, and his own work

became more simplified. Bourdelle established his own studio and received

numerous commissions for public sculpture. In 1909, he began teaching at the

Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1911, Bourdelle and his first wife divorced. He

married his former student, Cléo (Cléopâtre Sévastos), with whom he had a child.

The Torso of the Figure Called Fruit, on view here, is closely related to his full-

length sculpture, Fruit, a figure of a thin, long-limbed, nude woman with a distinctive

coiffeur. The resemblance of Bourdelle’s portrait drawings of her to the head of the

sculpture indicates that Cléo was certainly the model for the sculpture. Gazing

upwards, the figure stands with legs crossed at the knees and holds pieces of fruit

in her hand. Bourdelle first conceived Fruit around 1902 but in 1911 he made a new

version, 89 inches high, in bronze (casts are in Paris, Musée Bourdelle; and in the

Baltimore Museum of Art). Without the distracting head, hands, and legs of the full

figure, the knees-to-shoulders Torso, which emphasizes the S-curve lean of the

body, seems stronger and more focused.

Constantin Brancusi French, born Romania, 1876–1957

Maiastra, 1912

Polished bronze, stone

Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections; Gift of John and

Elizabeth Bates Cowles, 1960.22

Constantin Brancusi studied art in Romania before moving to Paris in 1903 to study

with Auguste Rodin. Rodin had dominated late 19th-century French sculpture, but

the young Brancusi felt he could not flourish under the great master and quickly left

his studio. By 1908, Brancusi had largely abandoned modeling in clay and plaster in

favor of the subtractive art of carving. Brancusi began to move away from literal

representation, creating sculpture in which form was simplified, tending toward an

essence. Unlike the Cubists, his contemporaries who were shattering and

multiplying form, Brancusi sought to distill essence, paring form back to an ever

greater purity. Using materials that seem streamlined and machine-like, he pioneered

a distinctive Modernist visual language.

In 1910, Brancusi carved a highly simplified bird in white marble which he titled

Maiastra, referring to a luminous magical bird of Romanian folklore. Between

1910 and 1915, Brancusi made eight bronze casts of the marble Maiastra, making

small modifications to the form. The Art Center’s bronze Maiastra is the second one

that he cast. It is signed and dated by the artist, “1912, Paris.” With its flowing

volumes and highly polished golden surface, Maiastra is a form of great purity and

dignity. The gradual tapering of the tail, continued in the arc of its neck, suggests a

will to flight.

Sonia Delaunay-Terk French, born Ukraine, 1885–1979

Contrastes Simultané (Simultaneous Contrasts), 1912–1913

Watercolor and Chinese ink on paper

Des Moines Art Center’s Louise Noun Collection of Art by Women, 1998.18

Born Sarah Stern in the Ukraine, the artist was adopted and was raised in a

privileged family in Saint Petersburg, from whom she took the name Sonia Terk.

After studying art in Karlsruhe, Germany, she settled in Paris in 1908 and studied at

La Palette, a studio attended by many Russian artists. But more interested in art in

the galleries than in her academic studies, she was attracted to the work of

expressive colorists such as Post-Impressionist painters Vincent van Gogh (1853–

1890), Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), and Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), and to Fauve

artists such as Henri Matisse (1869–1954). In 1910, Terk married the French avant-

garde artist Robert Delaunay (1885–1941).

Together, Sonia and Robert forged Simultanèisme, based on their theories about

the interactions of colors. Using the colored shapes inspired by folk art and fabrics,

Sonia began to create Simultaneous paintings, as well as accordion-fold

Simultaneous artists’ books and clothing. She recalled:

“About 1911, I had the idea of making for my son, who had just been born, a

blanket composed of bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of

Russian peasants. When it was finished, the arrangement of the pieces of

material seemed to me to evoke cubist conceptions and we then tried to apply

the same process to other objects and paintings.”

Contrastes Simultané in this exhibition is one of a series of abstract watercolors

that Delaunay-Terk painted to illustrate a lecture on Simultanèisme that Alexander

Smirnoff gave at the Cabaret du Chien Perdu in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in July,

1913. The watercolor is a demonstration of their theory that the juxtaposition of

colors, without linear perspective, creates space and movement.

Charles Demuth American, 1883–1935

Mountain Range, ca. 1912

Watercolor on paper

Des Moines Art Center; Mildred M. Bohen Collection, 1980.8

Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Charles Demuth spent much of his life in his

hometown. In 1905, he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in

Philadelphia. In 1907, he made the first of several extended trips to Paris. After

completing his studies in 1911, he returned to Lancaster. In late 1912, Demuth

returned to Paris for his longest stay, immersing himself in avant-garde circles and

studying at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie Julian.

Although Demuth might have painted Mountain Range during a trip to the

mountains of Pennsylvania, it is more likely that his watercolor rehearses lessons

learned from the work of Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne (1839–1906),

particularly his paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire in Provence. Cézanne repeatedly

painted images of this mountain throughout his lifetime. The flat-topped mountain in

Demuth’s watercolor resembles Mont Sainte-Victoire. The watercolor’s strategy of

laying down contours in blue wash and building up form with individual brush

strokes reflects Demuth’s knowledge of Cézanne’s art, whose 1907 memorial

exhibition at the Salon d’Automne in Paris exerted enormous influence on avant-

garde artists. Demuth undoubtedly saw that exhibition during his 1907 trip to Paris.

The expressive brushwork and vivid colors also reveal Demuth’s awareness of

French expressionist artists such as Henri Matisse and André Derain (1880–1954),

whose Fauve style emerged around 1905. Demuth would have seen their paintings

in Paris as well.

Back in the U.S. in 1915, he spent time in New York, where he was involved in

bohemian art circles and produced watercolors of artists and writers in bars, jazz

clubs, and bath houses. By 1919, Demuth began to paint the smokestacks,

factories, industrial architecture, and machines in hard-edged Precisionist semi-

abstractions for which he is best known.

Marcel Duchamp French, 1887–1968

Reproductions of works made in 1911 by Marcel Duchamp

(from) De ou Par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Sélavy (La Bôite en Valise)

[The Box in a Valise], 1955–68

Cloth covered case containing 68 miniature replicas

Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections; Purchased with funds from the

Mildred M. Bohen Deaccessioning Fund, 1990.9

Practically every facet of Marcel Duchamp’s activity was groundbreaking. A brilliantly

inventive artist and theorist, his career was meteoric. As a young painter in 1910 and

1911, he tore through a series of avant-garde styles before creating a series of

extraordinary Cubist/Futurist paintings. A few years later, he fabricated sculptures

that incorporated industrial objects, before moving on to declare that found objects

were “readymade” sculptures. Fascinated by reproductions of art, he made

subversive Dada works that attacked the status quo, such as drawing a moustache

on the Louvre postcard of the Mona Lisa. By the 1920s, Duchamp became more

absorbed in studies of visual perception and art theory, and eventually abandoned

the making of art altogether.

From 1935–1940, Duchamp began to assemble a little museum of his own

works from the past. Known as La Bôite en Valise, this box with sliding screens and

compartments contains 68 reproductions and small replicas of his paintings,

drawings, sculptures, and writings. Duchamp continued making versions of La Bôite

en Valise for the rest of his life. In the example on view here, we display

reproductions of Duchamp’s works from 1911. In this year, he was exploring a

version of Cubism other than Picasso’s, and was generating the ideas that would

culminate in his earth-shaking Nude descending a Staircase (No.2), 1912

(Philadelphia Museum of Art).

Lester G. Hornby American, 1882–1956

Dans le Jardin du Palais-Royal (In the Garden of the Royal Palace), 1912

Etching on paper


Edmundson Art Foundation, Inc., 1950.55

Born and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts, Lester Hornby studied art in Boston

before moving to Paris. Between 1907 and 1913 he was active in the art world of

Paris, exhibiting and studying with several teachers at the Académie de la Grande

Chaumière, among whom was Théophile Steinlen (also in this exhibition).

Stylistically, Hornby remained a late Impressionist. During his long sojourn

abroad, he traveled throughout Europe, making many sketch-like etchings, that he

drew with tiny strokes. His subject matter from this period included city and market

scenes, old mills, and country landscapes. By 1909, he already enjoyed success,

with his prints included in important collections in Paris and London, as well as in

the collections of the Library of Congress, and the New York and Boston public

libraries. In 1911, the Detroit Institute of Art held a major exhibition of Hornby’s

etchings and drawings.

Etched in 1912, Dans le Jardin du Palais Royal captures the flickering sun and

shadow of a summer day in Paris. Children holding hands dance in a circle, an

image that evokes the classical iconography of the Golden Age, while elegantly-

dressed mothers and nannies with baby carriages sit on park benches under fully-

leafed trees. The columns and arches of the Palais Royal’s façade provide a

backdrop of classical grandeur.

That same year, Hornby exhibited Dans le Jardin du Palais Royal in the gravure

section of the Salon of the Société nationale des beaux-arts. That year, the reviewer

for “Studio International” magazine, singled out Hornby’s print as “the finest and

most sincere American etching of the year.” Hornby ultimately settled in

Massachusetts, where he became a central figure of the Rockport art scene.

Gwen John British, 1876–1939

Chloë Boughton-Leigh, ca. 1910

Pencil on paper

Des Moines Art Center’s Louise Noun Collection of Art by Women through Bequest,

2003.328

Born and raised in Wales, Gwen John followed her artist-brother, Augustus John, to

London, where from 1895–98, she studied art at the Slade School of Fine Art. In

Paris in 1898, she studied briefly with James McNeill Whistler. After several years

back in London, Gwen John returned to Paris in 1904 and established her own

small studio. She painted and drew her friends, pets, and domestic surroundings.

She also began working as a model for other artists, including the sculptor Auguste

Rodin. Over the next 10 years, she and Rodin were lovers. In 1911, she moved to

Meudon, a town southwest of Paris, to live near Rodin. Their relationship ended

around 1914.

John probably met Chloë Boughton-Leigh, the subject of this portrait drawing, in

Paris in 1907. John made at least five sketches and painted three portraits of her.

Dated to ca. 1910, the drawing in this exhibition is quite close to John’s second

painted portrait of her subject (Leeds City Art Gallery). Probably a preparatory

sketch, it was drawn with a few rapid strokes. Chloë’s hair is pulled up casually, with

strands escaping (in the painting, her hair is even more unkempt). The three-quarter

view emphasizes her thin face and strong jaw line. With eyes open, lips pressed

together, and shoulders rounded, she looks slightly bored.

Wassily Kandinsky Russian, 1866–1944

Zwei Reiter vor Rot (Two Riders Against Red), 1911

John C. Huseby Print Collection of the Des Moines Art Center through Gift, 1972.54

Born and raised in Moscow, Wassily Kandinsky studied law, but soon abandoned

that career. In 1896, he moved to Munich in order to study art. Interested in a variety

of art forms from Russian folk art to Impressionism, Kandinsky’s early work in

Munich reflected the prevailing Jugendstil (the German term for Art Nouveau), which

emphasized color and flat pattern. His work quickly developed under the influence

of the spiritual Theosophical movement and he began to use color as a vehicle for

expression, detached from representation or description. Of all the colors, he felt

that blue was the highest representation of the spiritual. In 1910, Kandinsky

published his theoretical book, “On the Spiritual in Art.”

In 1911, along with artists August Macke and Franz Marc (both included in this

exhibition), Kandinsky organized Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group. These

three artists, who were inspired by medieval art, “primitive” art, children’s art, and

contemporary French Fauvism, hoped to establish an avant-garde alternative to

classically-based art from the Renaissance to the present. The group organized

travelling exhibitions and published a periodical, also called Der Blaue Reiter. The

Blue Rider group was active from 1911 until 1914.

In 1911, Kandinsky made Two Riders against Red for Klänge (Sounds), his book

of prose poems and images. This color woodcut includes the motif of the blue

rider—in fact, two riders seen on a grassy hill against a scarlet sky. Dressed in blue,

the male rider rides a stately, yellow-draped white horse. He forms a silhouette

against the white shape of a rising (or setting) sun, roughly cut out of the woodblock

for the red sky. Also dressed in blue, the woman rides a rearing horse. The woman’s

horse rises diagonally to the blasted tree behind the man. The fully-leafed tree above

the woman counterbalances the stable male rider and his horse.

Kandinsky stayed in Munich until 1914, when as an enemy alien, he was forced

to return to Russia. After the war he returned to Germany, where he taught at the

Bauhaus school of design from 1922 until 1933, when the Nazis closed the

innovative school. Kandinsky moved to Paris and spent the remainder of his life

there.

Isabel Moore Kimball American, 1863–1950

Girl Holding a Cat (Mikey Boy), 1913

Bronze

Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections; Gift of the artist, 1945.10

Isabel Kimball was born at Wentworth, in the upper Wapsipinicon Valley of northeast

Iowa. Kimball studied art at Decorah Institute and Teachers Training School, and

later at the Art Institute of Chicago. From 1891 to 1895, Kimball taught at Moorhead

(MN) Normal School (now Moorhead State College). She then moved to New York

to study at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Following her graduation, she opened her

own studio in Brooklyn, where she worked for the next 40 years. She made three

trips to Europe. From November 1909 through the summer of 1910, she visited

London, Paris, Rome, Florence, and Athens.

At the beginning of the 20th century, many American women were being

accepted into the ranks as professional public sculptors. Kimball enjoyed a

reasonably successful career. She received major commissions for public

sculptures. Among her most notable works were the Princess Wenonah fountain

(Winona, MN), installed in 1902; and sculptures at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens,

including fish head spouts for a fountain, 1928–30.

Cast in 1913, the Art Center’s bronze, Girl Holding a Cat (Mikey Boy), depicts

Kimball’s niece, Sarah Isabel Noble, who wears an enormous bow in her hair. The

child embraces her cat, who curves his tail around her body. The sculpture’s

gracious S-curves recall the flowing lines of late 19th-century Art Nouveau style.

A plaster version of this work is listed in an inventory of Kimball’s sculptures in

the possession of the Noble family of Riceville, Iowa. The artist donated this bronze

to the Des Moines Art Center after she retired and moved back to Iowa from

New York.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner German, 1880–1938

Dodo mit aufgestütztem Arm (Dodo Leaning On Her Arm), 1910

Drypoint on paper


In 1905, while Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was still an architecture student in Dresden, he

and friends co-founded an artists’ group which they named “Die Brücke” (“The

Bridge”). These artists sought a more modern and expressive alternative to the high-

minded, traditionally-inclined art of the academies. Admirers of avant-garde artists

such as Edvard Munch (1863–1944) and Henri Matisse (1869–1954), as well as

medieval, and early-16th century German artists such as Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528)

and Matthias Grünewald (ca. 1470–1528), Kirchner and his friends chose the name

“Die Brücke” to signify a bridge that connected the past and the present. Die Brücke

artists met in Kirchner’s studio in Dresden, for discussions, for casual sexual

encounters, and to draw nude models. They depicted friends from their own circle

of acquaintances rather than using professional models. In these years, Kirchner

was also visiting ethnographic museums and was inspired by the angular forms,

rough materials and expressiveness of tribal art.

Kirchner’s 1910 drypoint, Dodo Leaning On Her Arm, depicts the frequent model

and girlfriend with whom he had a relationship until 1912. The two expressively

angular nudes in the background are probably part of a painting leaning against the

studio wall. Kirchner rapidly drew with a steel needle that gouged lines in the metal

plate. He inked and wiped the plate casually, allowing oily printing ink to collect along

the burr raised by the drypoint line. The inky, un-beveled edge of the plate reveals

that the artist himself, rather than a professional printer, printed the print. In contrast,

Picasso’s drypoint, Nature morte à la bouteille de Marc, in this exhibition, was

printed by a professional printer.

In 1911, Kirchner and his fellow artists moved to Berlin. One outcome of the

move was that the themes of the group’s art shifted from scenes in the studio to

subjects of urban life.

Max Klinger German, 1857–1920

Blumenverkaüferin (Flower Seller), 1911

Color lithograph on Japanese paper


By the first decade of the 20th century, German Symbolist etcher, painter, and

sculptor Max Klinger had become so famous and influential that the Encyclopedia

Britannica, published in the year 1911, contained an entry on him. It describes the

artist’s “vivid and somewhat morbid imagination, with its leanings towards the

gruesome and disagreeable...he aims neither at classic beauty or modern truth, but

at a grim impressiveness not without a touch of mysticism.”

Between 1874 and 1878, Klinger studied in the art academies of Karlsruhe and

Berlin. Profoundly influenced by the aquatint etchings of Francisco Goya (1746–

1828), Klinger began to etch. In the course of his career, he made over 400 prints,

mostly line etchings and aquatints, many of which were narrative suites. Klinger’s

highly finished etchings often depicted visions, dreams, and desires. His works

seem to prefigure Sigmund Freud’s discoveries about the subconscious. In 1881,

Klinger published Ein Handschuh (A Glove), a series of 10 etchings about the

obsessions of a young man over a glove. A set of these etchings is in the Art

Center’s collection. By the 1890s, Klinger was at the height of his fame and

influence, as a member of the Berlin Academy and a professor of printmaking in

Leipzig.

In 1911, relatively late in his career, Klinger created this two-color print of a flower

seller, Blumenverkaüferin, on view in the exhibition. A looser drawing style has

supplanted the elegant polish of Klinger’s earlier work, and the straightforward

naturalism and sunny demeanor of the young flower seller are markedly different

from the dramatic black-and-white Symbolist prints filled with nudes for which

Klinger was best known.

Käthe Kollwitz German, 1867–1945

Tod und Frau um das Kind ringend

(Death and a Woman Struggling over a Child), 1911

Soft ground etching on paper

Des Moines Art Center; Truby Kelly Kirsch Memorial Collection, 1955.27

A towering figure of 20th-century art, Käthe Kollwitz was an artist of great emotional

range. Preferring the directness of black-and-white, she mastered etching, woodcut,

and lithography. An art student at the end of the 19th century, she was trained in a

Symbolist milieu. Her powerful images expressed sympathy for workers, women,

children, and the oppressed. After she suffered the loss of her son in combat during

the First World War, and amidst the ensuing chaos and discontent in Germany,

Kollwitz tapped into deep wellsprings of emotion. Her art achieved even greater

power. Although Kollwitz was not formally allied with Expressionist artists such as

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and although she never used their vocabulary of expressive

distortions, she expressed a similar rawness.

Etched in 1911, Death and a Woman Struggling over a Child, reveals the 43-year

old Kollwitz still working with Symbolist subject matter. This etching possesses an

almost shocking power. The three figures occupy the entire space of the

composition, rendering it an image of pure struggle. The pitch of the figures’ heads,

as well as their closed eyes and gaunt limbs, are perfectly calculated to express the

battle between the mother and Death. It is astonishing to realize that, in 1911,

Kollwitz had not yet known the grief of losing her own son.

Käthe Kollwitz German, 1867–1945

Selbstbildnis (Self Portrait), 1912

Soft ground etching on paper

Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections; Gift of Mrs. Edward Frankel, 1974.18

Käthe Kollwitz repeatedly made self-portraits as a means to self-knowledge. In this

Self-Portrait, etched in 1912, she depicted herself in a completely honest way,

making no attempt to flatter her aging face.

The technique of soft ground etching involves laying a soft acid-resistant ground

that contains a non-drying substance, such as petroleum jelly, on a metal printing

plate. The artist places paper over it and draws. The point of the pencil or charcoal

presses the paper into the soft ground, leaving an imprint that reveals the metal.

When the plate is placed in an acid bath, the textures of the paper and drawing

point etch into the exposed areas of the plate. When the plate is inked, wiped, and

printed, the resulting impression resembles a pencil or charcoal drawing.

Wilhelm Lehmbruck German, 1881–1919

Frauenkopf II (Frau F.) (Head of a Woman, No. II [Frau F.]), 1912

Drypoint on paper


Expressionist artists favored printmaking techniques such as drypoint, which

involved direct attacks on printing plates. In drypoint, the artist draws directly on a

copper or zinc plate with a steel needle, gouging the metal and raising a burr. Often,

the lines of drypoint prints appear angular (because of the difficulty of drawing

smoothly through metal) and furry (because of the burr). Drypoints are inked and

printed the same way as are etchings and engravings

Sculptor, painter, and printmaker Wilhelm Lehmbruck studied art in Dusseldorf,

Germany, where stylistic influences of his early works ranged from Art Nouveau to

the manner of Auguste Rodin. In 1910, Lehmbruck moved to Paris where he began

to simplify the forms of his naturalistic nude sculptures. By 1911, under the influence

of modernist artists such as Constantin Brancusi (in this exhibition) and Amedeo

Modigliani (1884–1920), Lehmbruck’s work became more abstract and began to

express greater spiritual content. Many of Lehmbruck’s sculptures recall the long-

limbed figures on the portals of French Romanesque cathedrals.

In addition to making sculpture, Lehmbruck made at least 200 prints. He

scratched his 1912 drypoint Frauenkopf II (Frau F) on the back of a used etched

plate. The printing process revealed the corroded edges, random scratches, and

streakiness of the used plate. These marks contrast with the elegant oval and

cylindrical forms of the woman’s features.

As a German national residing in Paris at the beginning of the First World War,

Lehmbruck was obligated to leave France. He returned to Berlin, where he worked

as a medical orderly during the war. Suffering severe depression, he fled to Zurich.

Lehmbruck committed suicide in 1919.

August Macke German, 1887–1914

Marienkirche mit Hausern (Church of Our Lady with Houses), 1912

Pastel on paper

Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections; Gift of Serge Sabarsky, 1974.115

Born in Meschede, in northwest Germany, August Macke grew up in comfortable

circumstances. In 1900, his family settled in Bonn. Macke began art studies in 1904

at the academy in Dusseldorf. In 1907, he went to Berlin to study with Lovis Corinth,

who was considered a precursor to the German Expressionists. Visiting Paris for the

first time in 1907, Macke discovered the work of the Impressionists, Post-

Impressionists, and Fauves. Inspired by them, he adopted an expressionistic use of

color in his own work.

In 1911, through his friend Franz Marc in Munich, he met Wassily Kandinsky.

Sympathetic to their interest in the expressive use of color (if not their belief in the

spiritual significance of color and non-objective abstraction), Macke, along with Marc

and Kandinsky, founded the group “Der Blaue Reiter.” Returning to Paris in 1912,

Macke met Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay-Terk. Their ideas about color,

movement, and space were to influence Macke’s work from that point onward.

Macke’s pastel drawing of 1912, the Church of Our Lady with Houses, depicts

the Marienkirche in Bonn. Macke had made paintings of this church since 1907,

depicting it as seen from various viewpoints around the city. This drawing shows the

church’s spire seen over a park wall, flanked by trees. Macke eliminates most of the

specific detail in favor of freely-drawn flat planes of brilliant color. His interest in the

expressive, non-descriptive use of color had fully matured.

Macke died in combat during the First World War.

Franz Marc German, 1880–1916

Geburt der Wolfe (Birth of the Wolves), 1913

Woodblock print on paper


Born in Munich, Franz Marc studied theology before deciding to become an artist.

On walks through the Bavarian Alps, he became interested in depicting animals in

nature. In 1903 and 1907 he made trips to Paris where he discovered Post-

Impressionists such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin whose use of color

expressed emotional and spiritual states. He was also profoundly impressed by

paintings by Henri Matisse that were exhibited in Munich galleries in 1910 and 1911.

In 1911, Marc joined the Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munich (Munich New Artists

Association). When NKVM broke up over some members’ objections to exhibiting a

large semi-abstract painting by Wassily Kandinsky, Marc, August Macke, and

Kandinsky seceded from the group and founded their own organization, Der Blaue

Reiter.

Active as a printmaker, Franz Marc made at least 63 lithographs and woodcuts.

Birth of the Wolves is a characteristic example of Marc’s work. His imagery is

distinctive for its representations of animals—wolves, horses, deer—in mystical

landscapes. Marc’s semi-abstract compositions are shot through with dynamic lines

and forms spin out of vortices.

At the beginning of the First World War, Franz Marc enlisted in the German army.

He died in combat at the battle of Verdun in 1916.

James McBey Scottish, 1883–1959

Sawmill, 1913

Drypoint on paper

Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections; Purchased by the

Benjamin A. Younker Purchase Fund, 1949.144

Born and educated near Aberdeen, James McBey worked as a village bank clerk.

After reading about printmaking in an art magazine, McBey borrowed the noted

French etcher Maxime Lalanne’s (1827–1886) Traité de la Gravure a l’Eau-Forte

(Treatise on Etching), 1866, from the Aberdeen public library. McBey began making

etchings that he printed between the rollers of a mangle (ringer-washer). By 1910, he

left his employment at the bank to concentrate on printmaking, spending that

summer in The Netherlands making drawings and etchings. In 1911, McBey had his

first exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in London.

Sawmill, on view here, depicts the interior of the timber mill at Overschie, a town

located between Rotterdam and Delft. Two men are guiding a long log against the

saw blades. A canal and two windmills are visible in the distance. The artist

scratched his image directly on the plate with a steel needle, gouging a line in the

metal and raising rich burr that produces a velvety printed line. The viewer’s eye

traverses a broad area of empty white paper which becomes an equivalent for

spatial recession. Seemingly random but deliberately-placed flecks and lines gather

in the mid-ground to form a densely shadowed, focal area.

Stylistically, McBey’s prints derive from the etchings of James McNeill Whistler

(1834–1903), one of the most influential artists of the Etching Revival. During the

1860s to 1880s, Whistler explored the formal and aesthetic properties of artworks,

considering them aesthetic arrangements of lines, colors, tones, shapes, and marks,

rather than mere copies of external reality. His aesthetic approach was considered

radical at that time. Like Whistler’s prints, McBey’s etchings simultaneously function

as compositions and as representations of objects in space. Whistler preferred to

have the printer leave some ink tone on the surface of the etching plate rather than

wiping it perfectly clean, allowing the impression to have an atmospheric veil (called

plate tone) rather than pristine whiteness.

Today’s viewer, knowing that Cubism and Expressionism were flourishing in 1911

recognized McBey’s etchings as conservative holdovers. However, in 1911—and

indeed through the 1920s—Whistler’s approach still seemed very modern and was

widely emulated.

Pablo Picasso Spanish, 1881–1973

Nature morte à la bouteille de Marc (Still Life with the Bottle of Marc), 1911

Drypoint on Arches wove paper


Mildred M. Bohen Deaccessioning Fund, 2006.17

During August 1911, while he was on holiday in the south of France, Pablo Picasso

worked on a large drypoint etching commissioned by his dealer, Daniel Kahnweiler.

Drawn in his new Analytical Cubist style, Picasso’s still life arrangement of bottles of

eau de vie and playing cards seems an explosion of barely recognizable shapes,

shards, fragments of words, and puns such a references to his new girlfriend,

“Marc(elle)” and the word “vie,” meaning “life.” The bottle of eau de vie also may

allude to the writings of Picasso’s friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. With works

such as this, Picasso and fellow Cubist artists upended the centuries-old European

tradition in which an image was essentially a fictive view through a window to an

ideal or natural world.

On September 5, 1911, Picasso returned to Paris with his large printing plate.

Two days later, Picasso and Apollinaire were brought in for questioning by police

who were investigating the August 21, 1911 theft of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa

from the Musée du Louvre.

During the autumn of 1911, before Picasso’s plate was steel-faced to protect the

drypoint burr from wearing down during the printing of the edition, a few proofs were

printed. The Art Center’s richly inked impression is one of 100 impressions from the

regular edition printed by master printer Eugène Delâtre and published by

Kahnweiler the following year.

Christian Rohlfs German, 1849–1938

Der Sprecher (Redner) (The Speaker [Orator]), ca. 1912

Woodcut on paper


As the oldest of the artists of 1911, Christian Rohlfs might have been the most

conservative. Yet surprisingly, Rohlfs was one of the most resilient, unafraid, and

independent. He was willing and able to overcome his 19th-century academic

training, absorb new ideas, and update his style throughout his life.

Born before the middle of the 19th century in northwest Germany, Rohlfs

received academic training in Berlin. During 1880s, he became aware of French

Impressionism and at that time brushwork and color began to play an important

part in his work. Around 1900, he discovered the works of Vincent van Gogh,

absorbing the Dutch artist’s lessons about using color to achieve emotional

expression. In 1904, Rohlfs accepted a position as artist-in-residence at a

remarkable collection of contemporary art, the Folkwang Museum at Hagan. In

addition to seeing new art there, Rohlfs studied crafts, weaving, and enamel. His

friend Emil Nolde (1867–1956) introduced him to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and other

artists of Die Brücke group. Although Rohlfs never formally allied himself with the

younger artists, he was energized by their ideas and processes. In 1908, inspired by

the example of Die Brücke artists’ prints, Rohlfs began making coarsely gouged and

knife-cut woodcuts. With their strong contrasts and dramatic distortions, his early

woodcuts are quintessential Expressionist prints.

In his woodcut, The Speaker, the figure is framed tightly, creating a

claustrophobic space. Three circles serve as ciphers for the eyes and mouth of the

mask-like face. The graphically strong image simultaneously black-on-white and

white-on-black. These two modes struggle for dominance, generating a kind of

visual noise. Between 1908 and 1935, Rohlfs made at least 244 prints. In 1937, the

Nazis declared Rohlfs’ art “degenerate” and he was forbidden to exhibit. He died in

his studio the following year.

Théophile Alexandre Steinlen French, 1859–1923

The Gossips, ca. 1910

Monotype on paper

Des Moines Art Center; Anonymous gift to the Truby Kelly Kirsch Memorial

Collection, 1953.22

Théophile Steinlen was born in Lausanne, Switzerland. Obtaining a university

degree, he worked in Mulhouse, France, before moving to Paris in 1878. In 1883, he

settled in the Montmartre quarter where he worked as a professional illustrator,

drawing in an Art Nouveau style. Steinlen also painted, sculpted, and made

etchings, lithographs and monotypes. Steinlen’s black cat poster designs for “Le

Chat Noir,” a Montmartre cabaret, are among the most recognizable images of 19th-

century French bohemian café culture. Around 1900, his work became less stylized.

He turned to a brutal realism, especially when depicting the working class people of

his quarter. In 1911, he co-founded a short-lived newspaper, “Les Humoristes.”

In Steinlen’s print, The Gossips, three women have stopped to converse. Their

faces are heavily shadowed and their closeness and grim expressions make them

seem almost conspiratorial. To make this monotype print, Steinlen dabbed black oil

paint or printer’s ink on a printing plate and then wiped away highlights with a rag or

finger. The plate was run through an etching press, yielding a single impression on

paper. Although the printmaking medium of monotype was invented in the 17th

century, artists did not often use it until Post-Impressionists such as Edgar Degas

(1834–1917) revived the painterly printing process. Around 1900, monotype became

a fashionable printmaking medium.

Abraham Walkowitz American, born Russia, 1878–1965

Abstract Figure Study, 1911

Watercolor on paper

Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections; Gift of the artist through the Whitney

Museum of American Art, 1959.22

Born in the same town in Siberia as composer Irving Berlin, Abraham Walkowitz

arrived in New York with his mother when he was about 8 years old (his mother had

to falsify his age to keep him out of the Czar’s army). In 1898, Walkowitz began to

study at New York’s National Academy of Design. Even before departing to France

in 1906, he was aware of modern art thanks to an exhibition of Claude Monet’s work

that he had seen in New York. Walkowitz spent 1906 and 1907 in Paris, where he

attended the Académie Julian.

At Rodin’s studio in Paris, Walkowitz met Isadora Duncan, a founder of modern

dance. Duncan danced her free-form choreographies barefoot, with loose hair and

flowing costumes inspired by Greek sculpture. Deeply inspired by Duncan,

Walkowitz obsessively drew her movements from observation at performances in

Europe and America, and also from memory. Walkowitz would ultimately make over

5,000 watercolors and drawings of Isadora Duncan. Walkowitz’s works are

considered important documentation of her dance performances. Back in New

York, Walkowitz was introduced to Alfred Stieglitz, whose pioneering Gallery 291

courageously promoted avant-garde European art. In 1911, Walkowitz had his first

exhibition at Stieglitz’s gallery.

Walkowitz’s Abstract Figure Study, on view here, is signed and dated 1911.

Drawn with just a few lines of watercolor and strokes of charcoal, it is far more

abstract than other examples of his work from that year. Certainly, in 1911 Walkowitz

was quite familiar with early experiments in color and abstraction by Der Blaue Reiter

artists in Munich and Cubist artists in Paris. But Walkowitz’s watercolor may actually

be later than 1911. It is possible that Walkowitz, who signed and dated this work

many years after the fact, may have actually been positioning himself as an

exceptionally early American practitioner of abstraction. The artist gave this

watercolor to the Des Moines Art Center in 1959.

Henry Wolf American, born Germany, 1852–1916

Gathering of the Mists (Morning Mists), 1911

Wood engraving on chine volant

Private Collection

No work in this exhibition differs more from all the others than Henry Wolf’s

Gathering of the Mists. This wood engraving clearly is a conservative hold over from

the 19th-century Romantic landscape tradition. The obsessive perfection of Wolf’s

engraving technique stands in complete contrast to the way avant-garde

printmakers in Europe were attacking woodblocks with gouges at that same time.

Wolf’s print represents precisely what most of the other artists in this exhibition were

rebelling against—masterful craftsmanship, careful description of the natural world,

ordered pictorial space, and tranquil visual poetry. This style of art, of which Wolf’s

print is the lone example in the exhibition, was far more widely accepted by the

public in 1911 than was modern art.

Henry Wolf was considered one of the greatest reproductive wood engravers

working in America at the end of the 19th- and into the 20th century. Born in the

region of Alsace, Germany, he studied in Strasbourg with the master wood engraver,

Jacques Lévy. Wolf arrived in New York in 1871. Although at the end of the 19th

century photo-mechanical processes had begun to replace hand-engraved

woodblocks in the printing of reproductions of art and photographs, these new

processes were still crude. Trained engravers who knew how to translate every

subtle variation in tone and texture by cutting fine white lines of variable thickness

into end grain woodblocks still made the finest printed reproductions of paintings.

Working at a time when prizes and medals were given at international world’s fairs

and expositions for outstanding engravings, Henry Wolf won many prestigious

awards.

In addition to making reproductive engravings, Wolf made his own drawings

which he engraved as original wood engravings. Gathering of the Mists (Morning

Mists) was “invented, drawn, and engraved” by Wolf in 1911. The print is composed

of thousands of tiny lines of different widths. The viewer perceives this constant

alternation of black and white line as continuous tone. One can almost feel the water

droplets in the air. Printed on chine volant (a diaphanous tissue not adhered to a

backing) this proof impression shows every nuance of Wolf’s shimmering landscape.

In Wolf’s obituary, published in “The New York Times” in 1916, this print was listed

as one of his highest achievements.

Anders Zorn Swedish, 1860–1920

Honorable William Howard Taft, 1911

Etching on paper



Raised in very humble circumstances, Anders Zorn grew up to become one of the

most internationally acclaimed portrait painters and etchers of his day. Born near

Mora, Sweden, Zorn studied watercolor at the Royal Academy in Stockholm from

1875–80. He began to make etchings in 1882, and ultimately produced at least 289

prints. After years of travel, he settled in Paris, and began to receive important

portrait commissions. In 1896, Zorn returned to live in Sweden.

Zorn traveled to the United States seven times. Among his portrait sitters were

three U.S. presidents: Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard

Taft, whose portrait he both painted (Washington, DC, White House) and etched in

1911. In the oil painting, Taft is seen from his left, seated in a white and gilded chair.

The blue wall above the painted wainscoting features a Greek key border.

The black-and-white etching, Honorable William Howard Taft, is closely related

to the oil painting but it emphasizes the darks and lights, and simplifies the

background. Zorn drew his etching in the same direction as the painting but the

printing process reversed the image. He carefully reversed the lettering, however, so

that the inscription would read correctly.

Anders Zorn Swedish, 1860–1920

Wet, 1911

Etching on paper



Each summer, Anders Zorn concentrated on genre studies, landscapes, and nudes.

Both in his paintings and in prints such as this 1911 etching, Wet, Zorn created an

idyllic world of healthy nudity. Drawing with long diagonal parallel strokes to build up

forms, he often depicted his full-figured nude models as if they were in the woods,

climbing on rocks, or swimming in the sea. The strong contrasts between shadow

and highlight often seen in his prints indicate that Zorn may not have drawn from life

but based his etchings on black-and-white photographs of the nude models posing

in the landscape.

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