The Krause Gateway Center hosts the Des Moines Art Center’s annual fundraising event on Saturday. (Photo: Krause Group)
By Dave Elbert
The Italian word chiaroscuro (pronounced kee-ah-roh-SKOO-roh) describes the artistic use of light and shadow to create the illusion of depth in paintings.
It’s also the theme of the Des Moines Art Center’s annual fundraising event, 2025 Gala: Chiaroscuro, Saturday evening at the Krause Gateway Center — the $160-million, museum-quality office building erected in 2018 across the street from the John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park.
Designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, the Krause building’s glass curtainwalls, angled roofs and open staircases give added dimension — chiaroscuro, if you will — to Kyle Krause’s private art collection.
While they may seem disconnected, the Krause Center’s location at 1459 Grand Ave., 2.5 miles east of the Art Center, is a silent reminder of the museum’s creation in 1948.
That’s because Art Center founder James D. Edmundson, pictured, added a unique provision to his gift in 1933 of $600,000 ($15 million in 2025 dollars). Edmundson’s will stipulated that the museum could not be built east of 14th Street, because smoke from the soft coal used to heat downtown buildings back then polluted the air and would ruin paintings.
Today’s Krause Center lies just outside the smoke-limited area.
The preferred location in 1933 for an art museum was on the east bank of the Des Moines River where the Embassy Suites Hotel is today. But that site was eliminated by Edmundson’s will.
More than a decade before Edmundson died at age 94 in 1933, he revealed his intention to leave a large donation to build the Art Center. Nearly a century later, the reasons for Edmundson’s gift remain enigmatic.
Edmundson was one of the Iowa Territory’s earliest citizens, born in 1838, the year the territory was formed. His parents lived in the Burlington area before moving to Fairfield, then Mahaska County when it opened to settlement in 1843. After Iowa became a state in 1846, Edmundson’s father served in the first session of the Iowa Legislature in Iowa City.
He began studying law in Oskaloosa and continued in 1860 while serving as a page in Iowa’s new capital in Des Moines. In 1866, he moved to Council Bluffs, where the bulk of his adult life was spent practicing law, investing in real estate, banking and insurance.
After his first wife died in 1890, Edmundson contributed $265,000 to a Council Bluffs hospital that was later named the Jennie Edmundson Hospital.
He remarried in 1894 and traveled the world with his new wife before settling in Des Moines in 1900. One obituary noted that throughout life, Edmundson “was passionately devoted to the best literature and, as a specialty, the correct use of English.”
The only connection I found to the visual arts was an article in a State Historical Society of Iowa publication three months before Edmundson’s death in April 1933. It noted that in 1906 Edmundson commissioned well-known American sculptor Sherry Edmundson Fry (no relation) “to fashion a statue of the famous Iowa Indian, Chief Mahaska,” which stands in the city square in Oskaloosa, in honor of Edmundson’s father.
An Art Center history written in 1984 describes Edmundson as “a reclusive lawyer, real estate investor and scholar,” but offers no hint of motivation for such a large gift.
It does, however, note that because so much of his wealth was in farmland, and because the Great Depression was underway at the time of his death, Edmundson “stipulated that his funds were to be held in trust until 10 years after his death.” By then the gift had grown to $700,000.
There were further delays because of World War II. When the Art Center was finally built in 1948 from a design by Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, more than $1.5 million was available from Edmundson’s estate.
The selection of the world-famous Saarinen during the 1940s — and later of two other world-renown architects, I.M. Pei and Richard Meier, for additions to the original building — are stories I’ll come back to later.
Dave Elbert has covered local history and Iowa business news for more than 40 years, first for the Des Moines Register and then the Business Record.
