A House of Cards: Picasso & Cubism

September 28, 2007 – January 28, 2008
Print Gallery

This exhibition is organized in celebration of the Des Moines Art Center’s recent purchase of Pablo Picasso’s drypoint etching, Nature Morte avec la Bouteille de Vieux Marc (1911), considered to be the artist’s most important Cubist print. The exhibition showcases the Des Moines Art Center’s Permanent Collections’ holdings of vintage Cubist art by presenting prints, paintings, and sculpture created in the 1910s as well as works created in the 1920s by artists who were at the forefront of, or inspired by, the Cubist revolution.

The seventeen still life, figurative, and landscape works in the exhibition reflect various facets of Cubism, a movement characterized by the explosion and reconfiguration of pictorial form and space in non-naturalistic ways. In addition to Picasso’s print, the exhibition includes Cubist works from the 1910s by Alexander Archipenko, Georges Bracque, Arthur B. Davies, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Lionel Feininger, Juan Gris, Henri Laurens, and Oscar Schlemmer. Dating from the 1920s are works by Natalia Gontcharova, Erika Klien, Alfred Maurer, John Storrs, Varvara Stepanova, and Agnes Weinrich. Also included is Marcel Duchamp’s La Boite en Valise (1949), the artist’s retrospective look at his own Cubist paintings, including his groundbreaking Nude Descending the Staircase (1913).

A House of Cards: Picasso and Cubism is organized by Amy N. Worthen, curator of prints.

Related Program

Gallery Talk
Amy Worthen, curator of prints
Thursday, October 11, 6:30 pm
FREE Admission

Join Worthen as she discusses the artists and works in this exhibition.

View the Gallery Guide here.

About Print Club