A Feminist Defense of Grete Stern, Part II

Four years later, I look back, rework and build.

It’s been four years since I visited From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A quick pit stop I made up — flying back to Chicago from Miami, I added eight hours of time between flights in Manhattan so I could see this show. Back in Chicago, I wrote about it for F Newsmagazine. I believe the following words will be a kind of “part two” — or what I tried to write back then and didn’t know how.

Back then, my frustration with the show was clear. I had met the work of Grete Stern for the first time during my first semester at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). My very expensive tuition gave me access to the Art Institute’s libraries, and all of its archived magic. Fascinated by the number of old flyers, catalogs and literature printed in every kind of paper, I dedicated my first semester to a research project of Argentine photography. While it was a very broad, ambitious, and impossible task to survey every known Argentine photographer, I can say that I at least tried. Grete Stern was one of them, even though she had been born in Germany, she had become a part of Argentina and its culture.

Grete Stern, Chaco, Argentina. 1964 © Matteo Goretti.

It was great to see an exhibition at MoMA just months after this discovery. The museum had pulled prints from public and private collections to display a broad sample of works by both artists in a retrospective fashion. However, I believed (and still believe) the curation of the exhibition created problems:

“One of the biggest disappointments with this beautiful exhibition, organized into his and hers gallery rooms, was that Coppola was represented by a larger amount of photographs and covering more wall space, throwing off the balance intended by giving them their own exhibition spaces. While Coppola’s legacy was seen in his street photography, his Bauhaus-style experimentation, and even a catalog of his ethnographic work in “The Art of Mesopotamia,” Stern is left as a mere portrait photographer, with some photomontage works that are expected from her Bauhaus training.”

Recently, in reading Andrea Giunta’s latest book Feminismo y arte latinoamericano (2018), I found a paragraph that, in part, summarized my frustration with this particular exhibition. Giunta discusses an exhibition by MALBA (Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires) and its catalog, created to provide context to the abstract work of two women artists: Lidy Prati and Eugenia Crenovich Yente:

“The dominant model [for creating the catalog] is reproduced as if it were impossible to think from a perspective capable of answering to male centralism. The [catalog] sections dedicated to Prati and Yente are preceded by numerous pages that reproduce the evolutionary canon of local abstraction. The reproductions of the works made by men of abstraction lead us to conclude that, without the fathers who authorize the story, their [Prati and Yente’s] work is not understood or worthless.”

Looking back now, I realize the same dynamic appeared in From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern had been given the spotlight, but only next to her ex-husband’s work.

Grete Stern, Chaco, Argentina. 1964 © Matteo Goretti.

It is possible that the totality of Stern’s work, which varies from photomontage, portrait, street photography to developed ethnographic and documentary works, did not quite fit the narrative MoMA created for this “perfect couple”. In the eyes of the curators, Stern could only exist in the abstract and surreal — perpetually opposed to Coppola’s photographed reality — as if she were incapable of creating work based on real people and real spaces.

To quote myself one last time: “It is very surprising that, given the motivation to include different kinds of work by both artists and the incredible resources the museum has (clearly manifested in the hunting down of images for this same exhibition) MoMA decided to neglect Stern’s photojournalistic work produced in the 1960s and leave the “Los Patios” photo-book in a touch-based digital monitor on a stand below eye level. Stern’s photojournalism and ethnography in the indigenous Northern part of the country resulted in a series titled “Aborígenes del Gran Chaco Argentino” that consists of over 1500 images. This massive collection of work along with the photo-book “Los Patios,” and the included works in the exhibition, would have given Stern the same flexibility and dimension granted to Coppola and his varied work. Instead, Stern seems to be accompanying her ex-husband by supplying the portrait photographs and experimental photomontages he didn’t produce.”

Grete Stern’s documentary and anthropological work marked a shift: She delved deep into Argentine culture, changed her lifestyle for many years, changed her surroundings. She explored beyond the city and beyond her home. She created photographs that she felt were necessary, regardless of what others were creating at the time. And most of all, she created work that was not meant to be in conversation with Coppola’s.

I now understand, thanks to Giunta’s book and clarity of thought, how presenting Stern’s work next to her ex-husband’s is just the patriarchal, “men-first” way of understanding art by women, even within institutions like the Museum of Modern Art.

My previous review attempted to look at numbers and factual omissions that created disparity, but now I would like to call it for what it is: A group of systemic and avoidable curatorial decisions that dismissed the excellence and innovation of Grete Stern’s work by forcing a comparison to Coppola, defined by the museum as her male counterpart.

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From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires