A história
The Des Moines Art Center is really three buildings that argue politely with each other across a park. Eliel Saarinen laid out the first in 1948 in low Lannon stone, hugging the landscape. Twenty years on, in 1968, I.M. Pei added a raw concrete wing around a sculpture court. In 1985 Richard Meier bolted on a third piece, sheathed in white porcelain-enamel panels, so a walk through the museum is also a walk through four decades of modern architecture.
The collection inside is modern and contemporary, and its best-known picture is a quiet one: Edward Hopper's Automat of 1927, a young woman alone at a marble table late at night, a painting people travel to Iowa to stand in front of.
