May
17–October 4, 2015
The Edward Steichen Photography Galleries
From
Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppolais
the first major exhibition to focus on the German-born Grete Stern and the
Argentinean Horacio Coppola, two leading figures of avant-garde photography who
established themselves on both sides of the Atlantic. The exhibition begins in
the late 1920s with each artist’s initial forays into photography and
typographic design. In Berlin in 1927, Stern began taking private classes with
Walter Peterhans, who was soon to become head of photography at the Bauhaus. A
year later, in Peterhans’s studio, she met Ellen (Rosenberg) Auerbach, with
whom she opened a pioneering studio specializing in portraiture and
advertising. Named after their childhood nicknames, the studio ringl + pit
embraced both commercial and avant-garde loyalties, creating proto-feminist
works. In Buenos Aires during the same period, Coppola initiated his
photographic experimentations, exploring his surroundings and contributing to
the discourse on modernist practices across media in local cultural magazines.
In 1929 he founded the Buenos Aires Film Club to introduce the most innovative
foreign films to Argentine audiences. His early works show the burgeoning
interest in new modes of photographic expression that led him to the Bauhaus in
1932, where he met Stern and they began their joint history.
Following the close of the Bauhaus and amid the
rising threat of the Nazi powers in 1933, Stern and Coppola fled Germany. Stern
arrived first in London, where her friends included activists affiliated with
leftist circles and where she made her now iconic portraits of German exiles,
including those of Bertolt Brecht and Karl Korsch. After traveling through
Europe, camera in hand, Coppola joined Stern in London, where he pursued a modernist
idiom in his photographs of the fabric of the city, tinged alternately with
social concern and surrealist strangeness.
In the summer of 1935, Stern and Coppola
embarked for Buenos Aires, where they mounted an exhibition in the offices of
the avant-garde magazine Sur, announcing the arrival of modern
photography in Argentina. The unique character of Buenos Aires was captured in
Coppola’s photographic encounters from the city’s center to its outskirts, and
in Stern’s numerous portraits of the city’s intelligentsia, from feminist
playwright Amparo Alvajar to essayist Jorge Luis Borges to poet-politician
Pablo Neruda. The exhibition ends in the early 1950s, with Stern’s
forward-thinking Sueños(Dreams), a series of photomontages she
contributed to the popular women’s magazine Idilio, portraying
women’s dreams mobilized by the unfulfilled promises of the Peronist regime in
Argentine society with urgency and surreal wit.
The exhibition is accompanied by a major
publication edited by Roxana Marcoci and Sarah Meister with a selection of
original texts by Stern and Coppola translated into English by Rachel Kaplan.
The catalogue will consist of three essays on the artists written by the
exhibition curators and scholar Jodi Roberts. Special thanks to the Estate of
Horacio Coppola and Galerie Jorge Mara— La Ruche.
Organized by Roxana
Marcoci, Senior Curator, and Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator, with Drew
Sawyer, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of
Photography.
Major support for the
exhibition is provided by The International Council of The Museum of Modern
Art, The Modern Women’s Fund, and The David Berg Foundation.
Additional funding is
provided by the Consulate General of the Argentine Republic in New York, Robert
M. Buxton, and the MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund.
https://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1482
