From Bauhaus To Buenos Aires. Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola MoMA 2015

approach to photography, film, advertising, and graphic design, Grete
Stern and Horacio Coppola each produced a stunning body of work, rooted in their studies at the Bauhaus and in the dramatic new ways of artistic
seeing unleashed by the interwar avant-garde. With the rise of the Nazis,
the couples European careers were cut short, and they fled to Coppolas
native Buenos Aires. There, amid a vibrant milieu of Argentine and migr
Published by
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artists and intellectuals, they thrived, harbingers of the New Vision in a
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the most dynamic of their era, yet until now, their achievements have not
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Cover, top:
ringl + pit
Komol. 1931
Gelatin silver print, 14 18 9 58" (35.9 24.4 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Ford Motor Company
Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell
(see plate 29)
Printed in Spain
Coppolas sweeping photographic survey of a Buenos Aires on the cusp of

radical change to Sterns incisive portraits of the capitals intelligentsia and
her powerful series of feminist photomontages, their work stands among
garnered widespread international acclaim. With nearly 200 tritone reproductions, including work never before published, and in-depth examinations of both artists careers as well as their groundbreaking collaborations,
From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola traces
the artists trajectory during the most relentlessly innovative decades of their
production, and in the process offers a critical new chapter in the history of
transnational modernism.
MARCOCI | MEISTER
Bottom:
Horacio Coppola
Nocturno. Cinematgrafo (Night Scene. Movie Theater). 1936
Gelatin silver print, 8 316 x 5 1516" (20.8 x 15.1 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Latin American and
Caribbean Fund
(see plate 174)
country caught up in the throes of forging its own modern identity. From
FROM BAUHAUS TO BUENOS AIRES

GRETE STERN AND HORACIO COPPOLA
Hailed in their own time as artistic revolutionaries for their transformational
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From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola

charts the careers of two dynamic yet often overlooked artists of the
interwar avant-garde during a time of exuberant artistic experimentation
set against the backdrop of war and intense social and political
upheaval. By the time the German-born Grete Stern (19041999) and
the Argentine Horacio Coppola (19062012) met at the Bauhaus in
Berlin in 1932, both had already begun to establish themselves as
major talents: Coppola through the development of his own precocious
strain of photographic modernism, and Stern in her pioneering work at
ringl + pit, the progressive commercial studio she cofounded.
Yet with Hitlers ascent and the Nazis consolidation of power, the couple was forced to flee Germany, first for London and then Buenos Aires.
A groundbreaking joint exhibition in 1935 was a revelation, marking
what critic Jorge Romero Brest called the first serious manifestation of
photographic art seen in Argentina. From there, Stern and Coppola
would flourish at the center of the community of artists and intellectuals,
both Argentine and migr, who were remaking Argentinas visual
culture through their revolutionary approach to photography, film, and
graphic designan approach born out of the European avant-garde
but which gained new vitality amid the flux of a nation forging its own
relationship with modernity. As a striking visual chronicle of the contemporary urban experience, Coppolas landmark 1936 photobook Buenos
Aires stands alongside the work of such legendary photographers as
Eugne Atget and Berenice Abbott, while Sterns intimate portraits of
the Argentine avant-garde and her arresting series of photomontages,
Sueos (Dreams), amply showcase her own singular vision.
Published to accompany the first major exhibition of these two significant artists and including rich reproductions of work never before seen
publicly, From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires brings the remarkable achievements of Stern and Coppola to new light and makes a vital contribution
to our understanding of one of photographys most celebrated eras.
256 pages; 199 tritone reproductions
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Plate 11
Plate 12
ROXANA MARCOCI and SARAH HERMANSON MEISTER

with an essay by Jodi Roberts
THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK
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CONTENTS
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pp. 89:
pp. 23:
Plate 1
ringl + pit
pit mit Schleier
(pit with Veil). 1931
Gelatin silver print,
5 1116 6 1516"
(14.5 17.7 cm)
Museum Folkwang,
Essen, Germany

Plate 2
Horacio Coppola
Untitled (Staircase at
Calle Corrientes). 1928
13 34 11 34 "
(34.9 29.9 cm)
Collection Alexis Fabry,
Paris
pp. 45:
Plate 3
Horacio Coppola
Avenida Leandro
N. Alem. 1936
5 78 9 14"
(15 23.5 cm)
Estate of Horacio
Coppola, Buenos Aires
Plate 4
ringl + pit
Leinen (Linen). 1931
Gelatin silver print, 6 316
8 1116" (15.7 22 cm;
here shown larger)
Museum Folkwang,
Essen, Germany
pp. 67:
Plate 5
Horacio Coppola
Estacin Retiro
(Retiro Station). 1936
18 12" (35 47 cm)
Collection Alexis Fabry,
Paris

Plate 6
Grete Stern
Composicin para un
libro de varios tipos
(Composition for a Book
of Several Types). 1943
9 716" (32 24 cm)
Estate of Horacio
Plate 7
Grete Stern
Sueo No. 7: Quin
ser? (Dream No. 7:
Who Will She Be? ).
1949
15 12 19 116"
(39.4 48.4 cm)
Museo Nacional Centro
de Arte Reina Sofa,
Madrid

Plate 8
Horacio Coppola
Plaza San Martn desde
Kavanagh (Plaza San
Martn from Kavanagh).
1936
7 516 10 12"
(18.5 26.7 cm)
Private collection
pp. 1213:
pp. 1011:
Plate 9
Grete Stern
Margarita Guerrero.
1945
12" (39.3 30.5 cm)
Estate of Horacio
Plate 10
Horacio Coppola
Corrientes al 3000
(3000 Calle Corrientes).
1931
printed 1996, 11 716
7 34" (29 19.7 cm)
IVAM, Institut Valenci
dArt Modern
Plate 11
ringl + pit
Zigaretten Garbaty
(Garbaty Cigarettes).
1930
6 18 6 18"
(15.5 15.5 cm; here
shown larger)
Museum Folkwang,
Essen, Germany

Plate 12
Horacio Coppola
London. 1934
Gelatin silver print, 6 x
8 716" (15.2 x 21.5 cm)
The Museum of Modern
Art, New York.
Latin American and
Caribbean Fund
Lenders to the Exhibition
18
Foreword
Glenn D. Lowry
19
Photographer Against the Grain: Through the Lens of Grete Stern

Roxana Marcoci
20
Grete Stern Plates
37
What the Eye Does Not See: The Photographic Vision of Horacio Coppola
Sarah Hermanson Meister
116
Horacio Coppola Plates
133
Common Convictions: Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern in Buenos Aires, 19351943
Jodi Roberts
212
Selected Artists Texts and Writings about the Artists

Compiled and translated by Rachel Kaplan
230
Selected Bibliography
Compiled by Rachel Kaplan
244
Index
248
Acknowledgments
Roxana Marcoci and Sarah Hermanson Meister
252
Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art
256
Lenders to the Exhibition
Foreword
Glenn D. Lowry
Estate of Horacio Coppola, Buenos Aires

The Art Institute of Chicago
IVAM, Institut Valenci dArt Modern
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa, Madrid
Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The New York Public Library
Tate, London
Collection Anna Gamazo de Abell, Madrid
Collection Sergio Alberto Baur, Buenos Aires
Collection Eduardo F. Costantini, Buenos Aires
Collection Alexis Fabry, Paris
Collection Jorge Helft and Marion Eppinger, Buenos Aires
Collection Helen Kornblum
Collection Raul Naon, Buenos Aires
CollectionLticia andStanislas Poniatowski
Collection Diran Sirinian, Buenos Aires
Private collection, Boston
Private collection, Buenos Aires
Private collection, London
Private collection, Paris
Private collection
Eric Franck Fine Art, London
Galera Jorge Mara-La Ruche, Buenos Aires
Galerie Berinson, Berlin
Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
Michael Hoppen Gallery, London
18
The Museum of Modern Art is proud to present From Bauhaus

to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola, the first
major exhibition of two influential figures of avant-garde
photography, film, and graphic design who established themselves as visionary modernists on both sides of the Atlantic.
As a survey of the individual accomplishments and parallel
developments from the late 1920s through the early 1950s of
the careers of the German-born Grete Stern (19041999) and
the Argentine Horacio Coppola (19062012), the exhibition
presents many works that have never been shown before in
the United States or elsewhere, while the accompanying catalogue offers an exploration of the trajectories of each artist as
well as an in-depth study of their collaborations.
Sterns and Coppolas paths first crossed in 1932 at
the Bauhaus in Berlin, where they were students of the acclaimed teacher and photographer Walter Peterhans. Stern
had already established a pioneering commercial studio,
ringl + pit, with her friend Ellen (Rosenberg) Auerbach,
and Coppola had begun groundbreaking experimentations
with photography in his native Argentina. With the rise of
the Third Reich, Stern and Coppola fled Germany, first for
London and then Buenos Aires, where amid a vibrant milieu
of both Argentine and migr artists and intellectuals they
revolutionized graphic design, photography, and film-based
practices. Advancing the ideas of the New Vision in which
they had immersed themselves in Europe, they achieved
stunning results. Coppola captured the unique character
of Buenos Aires from the citys center to its outskirts in his
1936 Buenos Aires, now recognized as a landmark photobook, and in his contemporary experimental film, As Naci
el Obelisco (The Birth of the Obelisk). Sterns forwardthinking Sueos (Dreams), a series of photomontages she
contributed to a popular womens magazine, incisively comment on womens relationship to a patriarchal social order
with an urgency and surreal wit that still resonates today.
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Considering the interdisciplinary works and cosmopolitan

contexts of these two significant artists, From Bauhaus to
Buenos Aires makes a major contribution to the histories of
interwar modernism and the international avant-garde.
After its presentation in New York, the exhibition will be
shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. This is possible
only because the exhibitions lenders (listed opposite) have
been willing to part with important works for a substantial period of time, and we owe them an enormous debt of gratitude.
The Museum would like to thank Roxana Marcoci,
Senior Curator, and Sarah Meister, Curator, Research and
Collections, Department of Photography, for skillfully and
thoughtfully organizing this important exhibition and catalogue, assisted by the fine staff throughout the Museum.
Deserving particular mention is Jodi Roberts, who came to
MoMA to work on other projects but whose expertise in
regards to the careers of both Stern and Coppola, as is
evidenced by her essay here, was invaluable. We are deeply grateful to the estate of Horacio Coppola for its kind cooperation. For their most generous support of the exhibition, we
extend our warmest appreciation to our funders: The Modern
Womens Fund, The David Berg Foundation, the Consulate
General of the Argentine Republic in New York, MoMAs
Annual Exhibition Fund, and The International Council of The
Museum of Modern Art, as well as to the John Szarkowski
Publications Fund, which made this publication possible.
Finally, I would like to thank the munificent Committee
on Photography, who, often in partnership with the Latin
American and Caribbean Fund, has facilitated numerous
important acquisitions of work by Stern and Coppola during
the past decade, helping to make possible this thrilling journey from the Bauhaus to Buenos Aires in the company of two
extraordinary artists.
Photographer Against the Grain:

Through the Lens of Grete Stern
Roxana Marcoci
In 1927, Grete Stern, an aspiring twenty-three-year-old

artist educated in graphic design and typography at the
Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, moved to Berlin, the intellectual capital of central Europe, where the rising culture of
the illustrated press offered women new professional opportunities in art and advertising. During the course of the next
five years, Stern would become actively engaged with the
avant-garde tendencies that, through an investigation of the
question of how art and design could be reimagined in relation to an emerging landscape of technological media, were
drastically revising many aspects of European modernism,
and she aligned herself with a current of visionary artists and
theoreticians involved in film, photography, and the Bauhaus
laboratory. Her position among the vanguard who were
revolutionizing visual culture precipitated a stunning body of
dynamic, innovative photographic, advertising, and design
work, which she continued after immigrating to Argentina in
1935, a pioneer in bringing to South America the new ideas
and ways of artistic seeing that had upended the old cultural
order in Europe.
Through her brother Walter Stern, who worked in the
film industry, Stern met Umbo (Otto Umbehr), a bohemian
Bauhaus affiliate, habitu of Berlins caf society of artists
and actors, and pioneer of modern photojournalism. Umbo
advised Stern to study with photographer Walter Peterhans,
who had achieved international renown as an independent
commercial and portrait photographer, and within months
of her arrival in Berlin, she started taking private classes
with him.1 She shot his portrait that same year (pl. 15) with
her first Linhof 9-x-12-cm professional camera that she had
purchased from him. The son of the director of Zeiss-Ikon,
a company that made precision lenses, Peterhans was a
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1 Before enrolling at the Bauhaus, Stern
was Peterhanss private student in 1927
and 1928his only student, in fact, until
Ellen Auerbach began taking classes with
him as well. 2 The term photo eye was
coined by Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold
in their 1929 book of the same name,
Foto-Auge. 3 The word play on objectiv,
which in German means both objective
and camera lens, is noted in Tai
Grete Stern.20
Detail plate 98
21
Smith, Limits of the Tactile and the

Optical: Bauhaus Fabric in the Frame
of Photography, Grey Room 25 (Fall
2006): p. 12.
technical perfectionist versed in mathematics, art history,

and philosophy, and his knowledge of exacting large-format
cameras reflected an innate interest in science and art. In
the context of Weimar Germany, the same machines that
produced bombers during the first fully mechanized conflict
in human history were redesigned to revolutionize art and
industry. It was a new machine age, and photography its
medium par excellence, bringing the experience of industrialization into the realm of aesthetics.
This photophilia, which saw in the photo eye a means
to redefine both human perception and the social world,
resulted in the formation of two contrasting yet loosely related
modernist tendencies: Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity)
and Neues Sehen or Neue Optik (New Vision).2 New
Objectivity, a term coined by art critic Gustav Hartlaub in
1925 to distinguish contemporary developments in German
painting, was quickly adopted to describe the most radical
innovations in photographic photography, the straight,
sharply focused images that included experiments with macroscopic close-ups and structural details rooted in a proficiency
with the objectiv (camera lens), which demonstrated a dramatic break from the painterly effects that had long dominated work in the medium.3 For Peterhans, as for Albert RengerPatzsch, author of the worlds first photographic bestseller,
Die Welt ist schn (The World Is Beautiful) (1928), the beauty
of the medium was derived from the cameras capacity to
precisely record and at once heighten the details of the thing
photographed while challenging conventional representation.
At the same time, other artists were exploring the medium
through myriad other innovations as well: multiple exposures,
photograms, light-space modulators, typophotographs, and
photomontages, a profusion of techniques that artist and
Bauhaus theorist Lszl Moholy-Nagy collectively coined as
the New Vision. Through both his writings and his own
photo-based practice, Moholy became one of the most influential figures in developing a new critical theory of photography. His short 1922 manifesto Produktion-Reproduktion
(Production-Reproduction), jointly written with his wife, Lucia
Moholy, explores the link between reproducible media (photography, film, and sound recording) and productive creation
in the stimulation of new sensory experiences and an expanded consciousness, while in his landmark 1925 book Malerei,
Photographie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film), produced
Fig 2 Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold. Foto-Auge (Photo-
Eye). 1929. Stuttgart: Verlag F. Wedekind. The Museum

of Modern Art, New York. Gift of The Judith Rothschild
Foundation
Fig 1 Poster for FILM UND FOTO (International Exhibition of the German Industrial
Confederation, Stuttgart). 1929. Offset lithograph, 33 23 18" (84 58.5 cm).

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of The Lauder Foundation, Leonard and
Evelyn Lauder Fund
under the auspices of the Bauhaus, he asserts that photography and cinema have heralded a new culture of light that
overtook the most innovative aspects of painting.4 Moholys
championing of photography (and, by extension, film) as the
medium of the future helped to spawn a remarkable spate of
international photography exhibitions in interwar Germany,
of which the most significant was the Deutscher Werkbunds
multivenue Film und Foto (Film and Photo), or FiFo (192930)
(fig. 1). Accompanied by two epochal booksFranz Roh and
Jan Tschicholds Foto-Auge (Photo-Eye) (fig. 2) and Werner
Grffs Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (Here Comes the New
Photographer!) (fig. 3)FiFo was seminal in establishing photography as the Kunstwollen, or artistic will, of modernist
culture, mapping the entire field of optical, spatial, and social
transformation.
Thus, the Berlin to which Stern relocated was in the

throes of a photographic revolution, and she would ultimately find this binding embrace of the medium epitomized at the
Bauhaus, where Moholy held sway and Stern herself would
enroll after the school relocated to the German capital from
Dessau.5 From its founding in 1919 by Walter Gropius as a
school of fine and applied arts until the Nazis shuttered it in
1933, the Bauhaus sought a thoroughly modern approach to
artistic media through its progressive, cross-disciplinary program. Avant-garde modernist painter Josef Albers integrated
photomontage exercises into the schools preliminary course
around 1927, and two years later, under the directorship
of architect Hannes Meyer, Peterhans was invited to introduce the first specialized photography class to the schools
curriculum.6 Peterhans reinforced the program in typography
and advertising design then being led by Joost Schmidt, and
he taught his studentsincluding Stern as well as Gertrud
Arndt, Fritz Kuhr, Elsa Thiemann, Bella Ullmann, and Piet
Zwart, among othersphotographisch sehen (photographic
seeing). In his teachings and his signature essay Zum
gegenwrtigen Stand der Fotografie (On the Present State
of Photography) (1930), he advocated for a new school
of seeing and a way of ordering that seeing in the world.7
Using Immanuel Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique
of Pure Reason) (1781) and Pythagorass geometric axioms
as a foundation, Peterhans devised a visual syntax known
as intellectual montage.8 In his picture-making exercises,
he transformed the photographic composition into montages
of found objects (fig. 4), organic and synthetic, constructing
tableaux that reveal unfamiliar aspects in familiar things,
eight of which were featured in FiFo. Peterhanss theory of
photography as an empiric and conceptual medium was instrumental to Stern, who noted: Peterhans taught me how to
create a vision of what I wanted to reproduce before using
the camera.9 Like her mentor, Stern demonstrated a knack
for experimental still-lifes (pls. 4, 34), revealing in fragments
of fabrics strange structural details through close-ups and
precise lighting, and she also photographed several sleeping
heads leaning on cushions or grass (pl. 16) after Peterhanss
style, which anticipate her famous Sueos (Dreams) images
made in Argentina some twenty years later.
In 1930 Peterhans decided to stop commuting and
moved to the Dessau Bauhaus. Stern acquired his Berlin
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Fig 3 Werner Grff. Es kommt der neue Fotograf!
(Here Comes the New Photographer!). 1929. Berlin:

Verlag Hermann Reckenforf. The Manhattan Rare Book
Company, New York
4 Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Produktion-
5 Originally established in Weimar, the

Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925. In
August 1932, the citys legislature voted
to discontinue classes at the Bauhaus,
at which point the school moved once
more and reopened in Berlin in October.
6 Herbert Molderings, Mosh RavivVorobeichic (Moi Ver), in Jeannine
Fiedler, ed., Photography at the Bauhaus
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press,
22
23
Reproduktion, De Stijl 5, no. 7 (July

1922): pp. 98100. Moholy-Nagy,
Malerei, Photographie, Film (Munich: A.
Langen, 1925).
1990), p. 75. 7 Walter Peterhans, Zum

gegenwrtigen Stand der Fotografie,
ReD 3, no. 5 (1930): pp. 13840. 8
Jeannine Fiedler, Walter Peterhans: A
Tabularian Approach, in Photography
at the Bauhaus, p. 88. 9 Grete Stern,
quoted in Josep Vincent Monz,
Introduction, in Grete Stern, trans. Karel
Clapshaw (Valencia: Institut Valenci
dArt Modern, 1995), p. 182.
Fig 4 Walter Peterhans. Fenier alter Herr (Portrait of a Man). 1932. Gelatin silver
print, 7 1316 9 34" (19.8 24.8 cm). The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
studio, which was endowed with a darkroom and largeformat photographic equipment.10 With Ellen (Rosenberg)
Auerbach, a fellow student of Peterhans, she opened a pioneering studio specializing in portraiture and advertising.11
Named ringl + pit after their childhood nicknames (ringl
was Stern, pit, Auerbach), the studio operated for three
years before the Nazi takeover. Establishing themselves as
independent professionals engaged with the New Vision,
Stern and Auerbach cultivated a circle of progressive friends
and lovers, which included their future husbandsfilmmaker
and photographer Horacio Coppola, whom Stern met in
1932 and introduced to Peterhans at the Bauhaus, and stage
designer Walter Auerbach, who was active in leftist political
circles.12 In them, the women found an intellectual partnership of equals, with all four occasionally sharing the live-in
studio and collaborating on artistic projects, a reflection of
the broader spirit of audacious artistic emancipation from
entrenched cultural traditions in Weimar Berlin that upended
10 Stern received an inheritance from

her fathers brother, which enabled
her to purchase Peterhanss studio and
equipment. 11 Ellen Rosenberg married
Walter Auerbach in 1937 and took his
name. As her work and career became
known under the name Auerbach,
I use this name here. 12 According to
Coppola years later, he was introduced
to Stern through a friend, Fritz Hensler,
after arriving in Berlin in October 1932.

Horacio Coppola, Imagema. Antologa
Fotogrfica 19271994 (Buenos Aires:
Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 1994),
p. 12.
Fig 5 Horacio Coppola. Still from Der Traum (The Dream). Plate 154
gender and other social norms. Ellen and Walter Auerbach,

for instance, performed in Coppolas 16mm short Der Traum
(The Dream) (1933), which in one sequence also includes
a photograph by Stern (fig. 5), while Stern and Coppola
took on leading roles in Ellen Auerbachs film Gretchen hat
Ausgang (Gretchen Has a Break) (c. 1933).13
BERLIN: RINGL + PIT

Throughout the photo boom that swept Germany in the 1920s
and early 1930s (film critic Siegfried Kracauer spoke of a
blizzard of images), lens-based media gained expressive
and economic potential for many women as they pushed the
bounds of new cultural freedoms. Marianne Brandt, Florence
Henri, Lotte Jacobi, and Elli Marcus were all professional
artists who experimented creatively with photography, voted,
and enjoyed sexual independence.14 Stern and Auerbach
played a critical role in redefining womens cultural agency.
They embraced both commercial and avant-garde work and
coauthored their production, fostering a groundbreaking
artistic alliance that subverted the clichd cult of the master,
and by operating in front of and behind the camera, they destabilized the myth of a unified, authentic self, often doubling
13 Art historian Mercedes Valdivieso has
also identified Walter Auerbach as a

passerby on the street in Gretchen hat
Ausgang. Valdivieso, Von Berlin nach
Amerika. Die Fotografinnen Grete Stern
und Ellen Auerbach im Exil, in Inge
Hansen-Schaberg, Wolfgang Thner, and
Adriane Feustel, eds., Entfernt. Frauen
des Bauhauses whrend der NS-Zeit
Verfolgung und Exil (Munich: edition
24
text+kritik, 2012), p. 216. 14 Women

in Germany gained the right to vote in
1918. 15 ringl + pit took alternate turns
taking the photograph and posing as
its model. Years later, they no longer
rememberednor caredwhose hand
took the photograph and whose hand
was featured in it, reinforcing their ideas
of joint authorship. From an interview
with Juan Mandelbaum, cited in Elizabeth
their artistic personas, simultaneously as authors and models.15

They repeatedly photographed each other (pls. 13, 14) and
their artist friends, including choreographer Claire Eckstein,
famous for her satirical cabaret dances performed with
Edwin Denby (fig. 6), and comedic actor Bernhard Minetti
(pl. 22). In a protofeminist scrapbook titled Ringlpitis (pl. 56)
that Auerbach offered to Stern on her birthday in 1931, the
two photographed each other in full masquerade, through
makeup, cross-dressing, and gender-bending poses. They put
on roles and took them off at will, enacting androgyny and
dandyism in the transgressive tradition of actionist work, and
they explored the edgy, masculinized identity of the Weimar
neue Frau (New Woman), considered a first global icon of
modernity, a close cousin of the French garonne or hommesse and the American flapper.16
Like Hannah Hch, the sole female member of the Berlin
Dada group, whose provocative montages of Weimar women with cutout pictures of tribal masks challenged European
gender definitions and racist and colonialist ideas (fig. 7),

ringl + pit explored alternative models of the feminine that
had emerged out of the sociopolitical upheavals of the
Weimar Republic through their construction of humorous
and nostalgic masquerades.17 These entailed mixing sartorial props to lampoon generational differences regarding
sexuality (pl. 40); playing with mirror reflections and reversals to multiply, refract, and fragment the seamless image
of femininity (pls. 32, 33); and using montage to expose
the stereotypical view of woman as commodity. The smiling
mannequin in Ptrole Hahn (pl. 31), an ad for a popular hair
tonic, holds a shampoo bottlewith the hand of a flesh-andblood model, challenging through its falseness the uncritical absorption of femininity.18 In the context of the emergent
Frauenkultur (womens culture), ringl + pits picture of
Bauhaus-mate Heinrich (Heinz) Clasing (pl. 24) equally
offers an other than masculine view of men, to paraphrase
curator Matthew S. Witkovsky, with Clasings shaved head
posed against a mirroring surface in the interest of staging
a surreal moment of psychic instability.19 His portrait, like
that taken by Peterhans of Andor Weininger (fig. 8), also
a student at the Bauhaus, denaturalizes the idealized and
unyielding image of the Aryan physique and psyche, which
would come to dominate Nazi art and propaganda.20
ringl + pits progressive stance led to several productive commissions. They collaborated with Berlin publisher Bruno Cassirer on the design of book covers and
art periodicals, including German translations of Jewish
authors. As early as 1925, Stern had advanced her skills
as a graphic designer in Stuttgart while working on posters,
letterheads, and advertising layouts for local businesses.
Several sheets of typographic exercises (pl. 52), one of
which focuses on Sterns own initials, disclose her familiarity with Herbert Bayers innovative design for klein schreiben (fig. 9), a universal alphabet in both sans serif and
lowercase that broke with the age-old tradition of ornate
German script.21 Stern understood typography as an instrument linking vision and communication, and she used it in
the service of modernizing middle-class Weimar culture.
ringl + pit also collaborated with the marketing agency
Mauritius, which led to their work appearing in small popular
magazines such as Neue Frauenkleidung und Frauenkultur
(New Womens Clothing and Womens Culture) and the
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Fig 6 ringl + pit. Das Tnzerpaar, Eckstein & Denby (The Dancing Pair, Eckstein &
Denby). 1930. Gelatin silver print, 6 58 6 1116" (16.8 17 cm). The J. Paul Getty
Museum, Los Angeles
Otto, The Female Madmen of Weimar

Berlin: ringl + pit Take On the Bauhaus,
Advertising, and the World, paper
presented at the Scholars Day From
Bauhaus to Buenos Aires, organized
by Roxana Marcoci and Sarah Meister
with the assistance of Drew Sawyer and
Rachel Kaplan (New York: The Museum
of Modern Art, April 11, 2014). 16 Ibid.
17 Maud Lavin, ringl + pit: The

Representation of Women in German
Advertising, 192933, The Print
Collectors Newsletter 16, no. 3
(JulyAugust 1985): p. 89. 18 Marsha
Meskimmon, We Werent Modern
Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of
German Modernism (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999), p. 61. 19
Matthew S. Witkovsky, Foto: Modernity
25
in Central Europe, 19181945

(Washington, D.C.: National Gallery
of Art, 2007), p. 72. 20 The premier
sculptors of the Third Reich, such as Arno
Breker and Josef Thorak, celebrated
the masculine and muscular body as a
symbol of Aryan health and strength.
21 This interest is also reflected in the
lack of uppercase letters in the ringl + pit
studio name.
Fig 7 Hannah Hch. Deutsches Mdchen (German Girl ). 1930. Photomontage with
magazine illustrations cut out and pasted on paper, 8 12 4 12" (21.6 x 11.6 cm).
Berlinische Galerie. Hannah Hch Archive
Fig 8 Walter Peterhans. Andor Weininger, Berlin. 1930. Gelatin silver print, 8 916
6 18" (21.7 15.6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther
Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
avant-garde journal Der Querschnitt. Their foto-reklamen (a

term for ads adopted from the French rclamer, or to call
out) were made for both German and Jewish clients, which
ranged from cigarette to pharmaceutical manufacturers (pls.
39, 54). Although advertising didnt constitute a major source
of income for Stern and Auerbach, it was an active sphere of
photographic innovation, one conductive to experimentation
with alternative modes of montage. Defying the stiff-upperlip style that had become the norm for German advertising
photography in the early 1920s, ringl + pit emerged as a dissident voice that stirred the interest of critics.22 In 1931, eleven
of their pictures, including Fragment einer Braut (Fragment
of a Bride) (pl. 27), Seifenlauge (Soapsuds) (pl. 37), and
Maratti (pl. 35), were reproduced in the widely distributed
Gebrauchsgraphik, a Berlin-based German-and-Englishlanguage trade magazine.23 Art historian Christian Zervos
22 In a 1998 interview, Ellen Auerbach

mentioned that German advertising
was terribly serious. See Susanne
Baumann, An Interview with Ellen
Auerbach, in Ellen Auerbach (Munich:
Prestel, 1998), p. 13. Maud Lavin notes
that to use humor at all in advertising at
that time was transgressive. See Lavin,
Clean New World: Culture, Politics,
and Graphic Design (Cambridge,
26
Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001), p. 59.

See also Ulrike Mller, Bauhaus Women
(Paris: Flammarion, 2009), p. 7.
23 For examples of ringl + pits work as
it appeared in print, see pp. 23233
in this volume. 24 Christian Zervos,
Nouvelles Photographies, Cahiers dArt
9, nos. 14 (1934): pp. 7076.
featured their work alongside that of Coppola and Peterhans

in his journal Cahiers dArt in 1934, in an article that praised
the photographers contribution to a new photographic culture
informed by philosophical and social concerns.24 Two of
ringl + pits works, which fuse Peterhanss crisp machine
style with Stern and Auerbachs own distinctively playful
Surrealist sensibility, were reproduced: Hut und Handschuhe
(Hat and Gloves) (pl. 30), an ad for womens accessories,
which includes a marionettes head with an uncannily animate
look, and Komol (pl. 29), an ad for hair dye, which flirts with
abstraction, a novel approach that won the pair first prize in
advertising at the Deuxime Exposition Internationale de la
Photographie et du Cinma (Second International Exhibition of
Photography and Cinema) in Brussels in 1933.
Although ringl + pit garnered considerable critical
acclaim in a short period of time, it was a success that could
not survive the changing political climate. Boycotts forced
many of the Jewish companies with which they had worked
in Berlin to close or for their owners to sell their businesses at
far below market value to Aryan Germans. Thus, ringl +
pits work of this period provides a lasting visual record
not only of experimental advertising but also of a disappearing German Jewish social life and economy that, by
the decades end, had been all but eradicated. Concerned
with pandemic racial and political discrimination, Stern
and Auerbach decidedlike other German Jewish photographers who sympathized with the political left in Weimar,
including Ilse Bing and Gisle Freundto shut down their
studio, and in 1933 they joined the exodus of artists and

intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany. Stern took her darkroom
equipment, negatives, and prints, and joined Coppola in
London, leaving all her other belongings behind.25 With a
financial gift from Stern, Ellen and Walter Auerbach fled to
Tel Aviv before eventually arriving in London as well two
years later.
LONDON: BERTOLT BRECHT, HELENE WEIGEL,

KARL KORSCH, PAULA HEIMANN
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Fig 9 Herbert Bayer. Research in the development of Universal Type. 1925. Black ink on
paper, 11 34 23 58" (29.8 x 60 cm). Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum.

Gift of the artist
In London, Stern worked for two years as an advertising

photographer, using the kitchen of her tiny apartment as a
darkroom, but her best work consists of a group of unequivocally modern portraits, which provide evidence of her
engagement with the citys cultural avant-garde.26 Recruiting
her sitters among the antifascist intellectual community of
German exiles to which she belonged, Stern revealed the
individuality of her subjects most nakedly. Indeed, as she
would assert years later: I was interested in faces before I
became interested in photography.27 These London portraits preface Sterns ambitious series of more than 150
photographic portraits of migr intellectuals that she later
completed in Buenos Aires. In their commitment to unvarnished physiognomic observation and a desire to document
a community in the early phases of displacement caused by
Nazi control and rising anti-Semitism, they bear comparison
to August Sanders taxonomic portrait project Das Antlitz der
Zeit (Face of Our Time) (1929). Yet while Sander constructed, in the words of Walter Benjamin, a scientific training
manual of German society, describing the social crisis of
identity within Weimar society, Stern provided an intimate
record of the intelligentsia in diaspora, replacing Sanders
typological impulse (fig. 10) with a focus on the individual.28
This type of portraiture practice, described by art historian
Michael Fried as radical facingness, claimed the viewers
attention in a new way, by simultaneously articulating the
pictures staged, or constructed, character and thematizing
its historical or documentary status.29 Her portraits of playwright Bertolt Brecht (pl. 46), actress Helene Weigel (pl. 45),
Marxist philosopher Karl Korsch (pl. 47), and psychoanalyst
25 Grete Stern, in the documentary film

Drei Fotografinnen. Drei Filmportraits von
Antonia Lerch, DVD, directed by Antonia
Lerch (1993; Berlin: Absolut Medien
with Arte Edition, 2007). 26 Stern had
relatives in London and had lived there
for a period as a child following the
death of her father, which facilitated her
immigration and ability to work there.
27 Grete Stern, interview with Antonia
27
Lerch, quoted in Mller, Bauhaus

Women, p. 135. 28 Walter Benjamin,
Little History of Photography, in
Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 1
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1999), p. 520. 29 Michael
Fried, Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, and the
Everyday, Critical Inquiry 33, no. 3
(Spring 2007): p. 502. Fried has been
developing his ideas on beholding,
Fig 10 August Sander. High School Student. 1926. Gelatin silver print, 9 716 5 14" (24
13.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection. Gift
of Edward Steichen, by exchange
Paula Heimann (pl. 48) attest to the richness of Sterns milieu

and her interest in contemporary theater, leftist political theory,
and psychoanalysis.
In February 1933, a few days after Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, Brecht and Weigel escaped
to Denmark, where they set up residence for the next six
years, during which Brecht traveled frequently to Paris,
Moscow, New York, and London. It is possible, however,
that Stern met Brecht before London, at the Marxistische
absorption, and facingness since the late

1960s. In the essay cited here and in
his subsequent book Why Photography
Matters as Art as Never Before (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
2008), he applies these ideas to
photography.
Arbeiterschule (Marxist Workers School) in Berlin, where

she and Coppola had attended several of Korschs talks
on dialectical materialism.30 Although Stern never officially
joined a political party, she held strong egalitarian, socialist views, and her friends included activists affiliated with
leftist circles, even some of the most radical ones, such as
Spartakus [sic], Luis Priamo indicates.31 Sterns picture of
Brecht, one of several she took of him in fall 1934 when he
traveled to London to work on a film project, concentrates
on his face, here shot in close-up view. With short-cropped
hair, working-class collar, and taut facial muscles, Brecht
exudes critical distance. In his influential theories on epic
theater, which he himself described as drama with footnotes, Brecht emphasized political context over emotional
content and argued for the de-dramatization of drama as a
forum for leftist causes.32 Among the new stylistic concepts
he championed as he worked towards a more analytic,
political theater were critical montage and collective production, which replaced traditional storytelling and authorship; the Verfremdungseffekt (defamiliarization effect),
which licensed the audience to adopt an attitude of critical
judgment toward the actions in the play rather than lose
itself in empathetic emotions; and gestus, or gesture with
attitude, which enabled the reading of a characters social
class and habits. Intended to be performed in schools and
factories, Brechts Lehrstcke (learning plays) resembled
the political seminars of his mentor, Korsch.
Korsch himself was a leading Marxist scholar and editor
of the communist journal Internationale, and a vocal critic of
what he deemed the vulgarization of Marxist tenets by the
nomenklaturas upper bureaucrats in Moscow, which led to
his expulsion from the German Communist Party in 1926. In
an emphatically lucid portrait, Stern captured Korsch against
a railroad map set on its side. The map is German, yet it
visibly displays the word England encased in a text box.
Incorporating the relation of sitter to geography, the portrait
provides a theoretical window on Korschs position as a
political exile, one he would inhabit until his death in the
United States in 1961.
Sterns portrait of Weigel represents her sitter during
a moment of solemn introspection. As a performer, Weigel
had an unmatched ability to fuse detachment and affect,
often delivering her lines in the third-person as quotations,
30 Luis Priamo, Grete Stern: Obra

fotogrfica en Argentina (Buenos Aires:
Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 1995), p.
19. This information is also remembered
by Horacio Coppola, in an unpublished
interview with Juan Mandelbaum,
August 1992. 31 Priamo, Grete Stern,
p. 19. 32 Bertolt Brecht, quoted in Devin
Fore, Realism after Modernism: The
Rehumanization of Art and Literature
28
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press,

2012), p. 122.
Fig 11 Bertolt Brecht. Stills from footage of Helene Weigel applying makeup.
1929. Akademie der Knste, Berlin. Bertolt Brecht Archiv
thereby converting expression into representation.33 In

1929, Brecht filmed Weigel while applying makeup (fig.
11). When examining the celluloid sequence, he noticed that
each frame corresponded to a self-contained gestic expression, as if Weigel staged herself as a series of photographic
stills, a talent eminently visible in Sterns portrait, which
captures Weigel at a volte-face moment of radical change
from Weimar avant-garde to exile.34 In 1938, Weigel traveled to Paris to perform scenes from Brechts plays, including
the role of the Jewish Wife in Furcht und Elend des Dritten
Reiches (Fear and Misery of the Third Reich). After the war,
Weigel and Brecht returned to Germany and settled in the
Soviet sector of Berlin. She became famous for her amplified
silent scream in Mutter Courage (Mother Courage) (1949),
which was inspired by a photograph of a mother mourning
her childs death. Her acting came to be held as a cornerstone of gestic dramaturgy.
For Stern, portraiture was a relational act with cultural
and social ties. Her portrait of Heimann speaks of her
sustained engagement with the contemporary currents of
Jewish intellectual thought and her emerging interest in
psychoanalytic theory. Heimann was a sought-after specialist who had trained at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute
and then joined the British Psychoanalytical Society after
immigrating to London in 1933, where she worked
closely with Melanie Klein, the principal theorist of objectrelations, according to which the mother-infant rapport
was at the center of personality development. Stern was
referred to Heimann for personal analysis by Ernest Jones,
founder of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and she
took Heimanns picture at that time, jotting down on its
verso a rather candid assessment of her work that succinctly
captures her view of a good photograph as an objective
document of modern society: This is Ms. Heimann. I
really like the way she looks. This is why this is a good
photograph.35 Heimanns psychotherapeutic work was
instrumental to Stern, who was then experiencing a series of life-changing events. In 1935, Stern and Coppola
married and traveled to Coppolas native Argentina, but
even at such distance, the impacts of the increasingly
dangerous political situation in Europe continued to be felt,
most personally for Stern in the news of the death of her
mother, who had remained in Germany and, threatened
with internment and likely murder in a concentration camp,

had committed suicide. Stern, now pregnant, returned to
London for a few months, only to decide to permanently
close her studio and rejoin her husband in Buenos Aires
after the birth of the couples first child, Silvia, on March 7,
1936, an event Stern would commemorate in a later photomontage by superimposing Silvias head on a paintbrush
stamped with the words made in England (pl. 101).
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33 Ibid., p. 140. 34 Ibid., p. 152.
35 Silvia Coppola recalled Sterns
introduction to Heimann via Jones in a

telephone conversation with Mariano
Ben Plotkin in 1997, cited in Plotkin,
Tell Me Your Dreams: Psychoanalysis
and Popular Culture in Buenos Aires,
19301950, The Americas 55, no. 4
(April 1999): p. 622. Sterns inscription
on the verso of her portrait of Heimann
29
reads: Das ist Frau Heimann. Mir gefllt

so gut, wie sie aussieht + dann finde ich
es ist ein gutes Foto, darum schick ichs
Dir. In fall 2013, I was able to consult
the extensive collection of the work of
Grete Stern and ringl + pit at Museum
Folkwang, Essen, which includes this
photograph. My special thanks to Tobia
Bezzola, the museums director, and his
staff for making this possible. 36 Jorge
BUENOS AIRES: EDITORIAL SUR, CONCRETE AND MAD

ART, AND ARCHITECTURAL PROJECTS
In October 1935, art critic Jorge Romero Brest published
Fotografas de Horacio Coppola y Grete Stern in Sur,
the literary magazine published by writer and intellectual
Victoria Ocampo. Written on the occasion of the artists
first joint exhibition, held in Surs editorial headquarters in
Buenos Aires, it ventures beyond a mere review to become
an extensive theoretical text on the aesthetic and social functions of modern photography steeped in Marxian terminology:
consciousness of the object, reality of a social order,
realist intention, dialectic of images, political truth.36
Romero Brests evaluation of photographys significance is
reflected in his analysis of Coppolas Bauhaus exercises and
socially conscious London photographs, and Sterns Berlin
foto-reklamen and unorthodox portraits, which, he notes,
evinced a social and political commitment and contributed
to a new photographic culture.37 The invitation card for the
Sur exhibition, designed by Stern, included on its verso a
short manifesto written by her and Coppola. Informed by
Peterhanss teachings as well as Franz Rohs idea that
selectionincluding framing, lighting, gradation of depth,
and degree of sharpness of the photographconstitutes an
act of creation, their text poses the question, Is photography
art?, before answering: In fact, photography has refrained
from addressing this issue: it has created its own place in todays life; it has a social function.38 In other words, for Stern
and Coppola the question was not how prior conceptions
of art could be used to define photography but how photography might redefine art within the social context. Their
statement is indicative of the extent to which the pair was
Romero Brest, Fotografas de Horacio

Coppola y Grete Stern, Sur 5, no. 13
(October 1935): pp. 91102. 37 Ibid.,
p. 102. As there was no catalogue for
the exhibition, the photographs that were
shown can only be deduced from those
Romero Brest mentions in his essay in Sur
as well as from the selected reproductions
published in La Prensa and La Nacin
newspapers on October 6, 1935. 38 See
Rachel Kaplans translation of this text in

this volume.
preoccupied with the idea of imbedding photography in the

real world as the sine qua non of the mediums modernity.
Romero Brest declared their exhibition to be the first serious
manifestation of photographic art in Argentina.
Sterns entre into the cultural circles of Buenos Aires was
no doubt facilitated by Coppola, who prior to his extended
trip to Europe had already achieved a degree of recognition
for his photography and critical writings, and the couples
joint showing at Sur, arguably one of the most significant
literary magazines in the country, marked a clear shift from
the usual exhibition spaces to a place of intellectual legitimacy, in the words of art historian Vernica Tell.39 Given
Surs ties with European intellectuals that aligned the journal
with the antifascist cause, the exhibition situated Sterns and
Coppolas practices apart from the conformist photo clubs of
Buenos Aires and within an intellectual sociopolitical context,
a position further solidified when both photographers contributed images to Anuario socialista, the yearly publication of
the Argentine Socialist Party, in 1937. During the next several
years, a period known as the antifascist international, Stern
would submit photographic portraits of left-wing activist artists
and intellectuals to numerous antifascist and exile publications,
such as Unidad, Camarada, De mar a mar, Correo Literario,
and Libertad Creadora.
Fully immersed in the cultural life of Buenos Aires,
Stern played an active role within the collective of modernist artists and writers, both Argentine and exiles, who
were quickly becoming established, and it was in this
context of cross-cultural currents of avant-garde expression
that her own photographic and design work advanced.
Together with Coppola, and in association with painter Luis
Seoane, a recent exile from Francos Spain, she opened
an avant-garde studio specialized in advertising in 1937.
While their modernist practices did not lead to commercial
success, they attracted like-minded artists, and that same
year Attilio Rossi, Surs chief art critic, devoted an entire
issue of the Milan-based journal Campo Grafico to Sterns
and Coppolas works. Stern conceptualized the layout of
that issue, conceiving a photomontage for its cover, and
her contact with publishing firms resulted in further assignments for cover designs, which notably included the photomontage for the cover of the second edition of Coppolas
Buenos Aires (p. 219, fig. 8), a book that would become
39 Vernica Tell, Entre el arte y la

reproduccin: el lugar de la fotografa,
in Andrea Giunta and Laura Malosetti
Costa, eds., Arte de posguerra: Jorge
Romero Brest y la revista Ver y Estimar
(Buenos Aires: Ediciones Paids, 2005):
p. 244. 40 Juan Manuel Bonet, Grete
Stern dans le Buenos Aires moderne,
in Grete Stern: BerlinBuenos Aires
(Besanon, France: Muse des Beaux-Arts
30
et dArchologie, 2008), p. 80. 41 Sara

Facio, quoted in Priamo, Grete Stern, pp.
2324.
emblematic of the multifaceted Argentine capital at the

crossroads of modern art and urbanism.
In 1940, following the birth of their son, Andrs Norberto,
the couple moved to the nearby suburb Ramos Meja, into a
modernist house built for them by architect and Sur contributor Wladimiro Acosta, an earlyand radicalproponent of
environmental design whose helios system provided optimal
thermal conditions through the interaction of spaces and light.
Known as the factory both for its stark appearance and the
artistic output originating from within, the house was endowed
with a two-story studio and a glass curtain wall reminiscent of
Gropiuss Bauhaus building in Dessau.40
After Stern and Coppola divorced in 1943, Stern
retained the Ramos Meja house as her home, and she
transformed it into an intellectual hub where modern art was
exhibited and discussed. It became, as artist Sara Facio has
stated, a meeting place to artists, a cultural circle, a space
in which to display works of all kind, and the expression
going to Ramos became synonymous with a new cultural
mecca.41 Throughout the 1940s, Stern took an astonishing
number of portraits of artists and writers, many of whom
were aligned with the international antifascist cause and the
emergence of an emancipatory feminist consciousness. These
included feminist playwright Amparo Alvajar (pl. 65), who
came to Argentina after Francos military coup in 1936 and
devoted herself to the newly established field of Galician
gender studies; socialist realist painters Antonio Berni (pl. 61),
Gertrudis Chale (pl. 60), and Lino Eneas Spilimbergo (pl. 66),
captured by Stern in intimate, close-up views in their studios;
poet Mony Hermelo (pl. 72), set against the geometric design
of a modern textile; and leftist graphic designer Clment
Moreau (pl. 74), a compatriot from the Weimar Republic and
former Spartacist member, addressing the camera directly.
Among Sterns numerous other subjects were poet-politician
Pablo Neruda (pl. 69), on his visit to Buenos Aires for a series
of lectures in 1945, the year he joined the Communist Party
in Chile; abstract painter Manuel ngeles Ortiz (pl. 71),
shown in a double-mirrored image, following his internment
in a concentration camp during the Spanish Civil War and
subsequent exile in Argentina; and writer Jorge Luis Borges
(pl. 62), glasses in hand, a foreshadowing sign of his deteriorating eyesight and imminent blindness. Indeed, Sterns first
solo exhibition, in 1943 at Galeria Mller in Buenos Aires,
was comprised entirely of portraits of local friends and of the

political exiles who were continuously arriving from wartorn Europe. Shot in her signature style against stark backgrounds, eschewing the dramatic lighting that was in vogue
for portraits at the time, and never retouched or edited, these
images focus for the most part on the sitters face, which was,
for Stern, the locus of individuality. Poet Mara Elena Walsh,
one of Sterns repeated portrait subjects (pl. 68), called these
portraits desnudos faciales (facial nudes).42 Stern also
took several arresting self-portraits (pls. 5759), and in one
instance she allowed a mingling of stereotypically feminine
and masculine props (floral arrangements, architectural rules,
lenses) while incorporating a circular mirror to reproduce her
semblance solely as reflection. Stern used both the mirror and
the lens as tools for self-analysis, and like her fellow Bauhaus
alumna Florence Henri (fig. 12), she coupled montage and
rupture strategies to play with spatial extension and fragmentation. The experimental nature of Sterns self-portrait also
introduced themes central to contemporary literature. In their
writings, avant-gardists such as Borges, the artist Xul Solar,
and the architect Alberto Prebisch explored the physical and
artistic particularities of prisms and mirrors, infinity and time,
labyrinths and artistic doubling.
The decade from 1945 to 1955 was as notably creative
for Stern as it was politically charged for her adopted country.
As the Allies celebrated victory over fascism and the end of
the Second World War in Europe, Juan Domingo Pern took
center stage in Argentina, inaugurating widespread economic
reform in his first presidential term (194652) and military
dictatorship in his second (195255), as well as a return to
patriarchal authority after the death of his wife, Eva Pern. As
early as 1946, Sterns friends associated with Sur, including
Borges and Ocampo, began publishing work suggesting
that totalitarianism had taken root in Argentina, and Stern
became an active collaborator of the leftist, anti-Peronist
avant-garde groups that were interested in geometric abstraction and Concrete art, which stemmed from the single-issue
Arturo, an interdisciplinary magazine of the abstract arts
published in 1944 by artists Carmelo Arden Quin, Gyula
Kosice, Rhod Rothfuss, and Edgar Bayley.43 A year later, two
critical exhibitions of Concrete art, music, dance, and poetry,
both held in private homes rather than traditional galleries,
took place in Buenos Aires: Art Concret Invention opened on
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42 Mara Elena Walsh, Los desnudos
faciales de Grete Stern, Sur, October
November 1952: p. 146. 43 John King,
Toward a Reading of the Argentine
Literary Magazine Sur, Latin American
Research Review 16, no. 2 (1981): pp.
6465. Victoria Ocampos sustained
opposition to the Peronist regime led to
her brief imprisonment in 1953.
31
Fig 12 Florence Henri. Selbstportrait (Self-Portrait). 1928. Gelatin silver print, 9 78

7 14" (25.1 18.4 cm). Collection David Dechman and Michel Mercure
October 8, 1945, in the home of prominent psychoanalyst

Enrique Pichon-Rivire, and El Movimiento de Arte Concreto
Invencin (The Movement of Concrete Art Invention) opened
on December 2 in Sterns home in Ramos Meja (fig. 13).
The latter became the embryo of the Mad movement led
by Arden Quin, Kosice, and Rothfuss, which, as its name
suggests (Mad was formed by joining the first two syllables of
materialismo dialectico), was based on Marxist ideas of dialectic materialism. In stark contrast with Perns propaganda
(disseminated via radio, popular magazines, public posters,
and, a bit later, television), this groups commitment to the language of nonfigurative art as a system for a new, egalitarian
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Fig 13 Grete Stern. Brochure for the
exhibition El Movimiento de Arte
Concreto Invencin (The Movement
of Concrete Art Invention). 1945.
Photomontage. Estate of Horacio
worldview was communicated through abstract rather than

descriptive visual and linguistic means of production.44 Sterns
photomontages and her training at the Bauhauswhere
dominant trends in abstract art, design, photography, and
architecture originatedwere considered critical to the foundational aesthetics of the Mad group. Her library, too, was a
significant source of information, and Kosice had her Bauhaus
books translated into Spanish.45
Stern photographed many of the Mad members, including Kosice and his wife, painter Diyi Laa (pls. 63, 64),
as well as psychoanalyst Marie Langer (pl. 70). Between
1947 and 1954, the group published the journal Arte Mad
Universal. For the journals second issue, Stern conceived a
famous photomontage (pl. 77), for which she combined the
letter M from a neon sign advertising Movado watches
series of commissions and publishing collaborations that she

undertook in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1947 she
contributed to the architectural magazines La Arquitectura de
Hoy (Todays Architecture) and Nuestra Arquitectura (Our
Architecture) a series of pictures devoted to architect Amancio
Williamss modernist Casa del Arroyo (Bridge House) in
Mar del Plata, an utterly innovative design for a single-story
exposed-concrete structure supported by a sweeping arch
across a stream, which marked a turning point in the architectural understanding of the relationship between technology,
climate, and landscape in Argentina.46 That same year, Stern
was also appointed as photographer and graphic designer
for the Estudio del Plan de Buenos Aires (EPBA), the citys
central planning agency. The urban concept for Buenos Aires
that Le Corbusier had developed in the 1930s was published
in 1947 in La Arquitectura de Hoy, becoming assimilated
into the official discourse on efficiency and functionalism. The
EPBA was led by a team of Le Corbusiers former disciples
Jorge Ferrari Hardoy, Antoni Bonet, and Juan Kurchan
whose urban ideas called for architecture to connect with
the local landscape and climate, and for the use of native
construction materials.47 For the cover of EPBAs 1949 exhibition brochure (fig. 14), Stern contributed a photomontage
that shows a new perception of Buenos Aires. Made of cutand-pasted images of streets and buildings seen from various
perspectives, it reveals the heterogeneity, disorder, and truly
chaotic growth of the capital city. Bold red bands inscribed
with white letters spell out the alarmingly steep rise in population over the course of two centuries. What is striking about
Sterns design for this publication is her use of a sensorial
barrage of verbal and visual elements to urgently communicate the vicissitudes of a dystopian metropolis. Folding out into
four panels, the brochure describes a Buenos Aires besieged
by traffic, overpopulation, dirt, and pollution, a design that
reflects Sterns understanding of how ideas about architecture
and urbanism can be deployed in a mass-mediated society
that is, as an advertisement for a new kind of urban planning,
working in concert with EPBAs promotion of the development of Bajo Belgrano, a future neighborhood based on Le
Corbusiers ideas of the radiant city. By the end of 1949,
however, any hope for the plan to be built expired as a newly
appointed mayor of Buenos Aires discontinued the commission. In 1951, geographer Francisco de Aparicio invited
with the other three letters to form the oversized, threedimensional word MAD, which she superimposed on
the obelisk in Plaza de la Repblica designed by Alberto
Prebisch in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the
capitals founding. Sterns use of the obelisk, an icon of
geometry and abstraction, was obviously deliberate.
In Europe, the vigorous debates and wide-ranging
utopian investigations that had characterized much of the
interwar activity of the avant-garde left had been enervated, if
not entirely snuffed out, by the rise of Soviet dominion and the
rigidity of Cold War battle lines, yet in Buenos Aires, something of this spirit remained as numerous artists turned toward
industrial design, typography, and architecture as a means
of implementing social change. Sterns own engagement with
architects and the architecture of Buenos Aires consisted of a
44 It was at this time that key ministers
46 Amancio Williams, Casa Habitacin
32
33
in the Peronist government publicly

condemned abstract art. See Sophie
Bernards Chronology in Grete
Stern: BerlinBuenos Aires, p. 152. 45
Ana Jorgelina Pozzi-Harris, Marginal
Disruptions: Concrete and Mad Art
in Argentina, 194055 (PhD diss.,
University of Texas at Austin, 2007),
p. 65.
en Mar del Plata, La Arquitectura de

Hoy 1, no. 2 (February 1947): pp. 75
89; Casa en Mar del Plata. Amancio
Williams y Delfina G. de Williams,
Nuestra Arquitectura 8 (August 1947).
47 La Arquitectura de Hoy, published in
Buenos Aires, was the Castilian-language
version of LArchitecture dAujourdhui,
founded in France in 1930 by Andr
Bloc, to which Le Corbusier was a

frequent contributor.
Fig 14 Grete Stern. Brochure for the Estudio del Plan de Buenos Aires plan for the Bajo
Belgrano neighborhood. 1949. Photomontage. Estate of Horacio Coppola, Buenos Aires
Stern, who had by now become highly regarded among the

citys photographers, to document the architectonic fabric of
Buenos Aires for a book to be printed by Ediciones Peuser
(fig. 15). Working with both a 35mm Leica and largeformat cameras, Stern shot some 1,500 pictures in one year,
recording the citys center buzzing around the landmarks of
modern life and its farthest, more quiet neighborhoods, the
accretion of neon lights and streets packed with crowds, the
Fig 15 Horacio Ral Klappenbach and Grete Stern. Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires:
Ediciones Peuser, 1956, n.p. The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York
subway stations and automobiles, synagogues and churches,

the relentless flux of commercial areas and the quietude of residential parks. The result is a brilliant, quasi-cinematic urban
narrative. As Sterns only book on this subject, it provides a
unique photographic document of mid-century Buenos Aires
that situates architecture in the force fields of aesthetics, economy, conflicting civic ideals, and technological mediation.
SUEOS (DREAMS)
Among Sterns most significant accomplishments in the
decade following the end of World War II are her Sueos
(Dreams), a series of photomontages that she contributed
on a weekly basis to the womens magazine Idilio (Idyll)
from 1948 to 1951 for the column El psicoanlisis le
ayudar (Psychoanalysis Will Help You), itself a reflection
of the considerable interest in psychoanalysis in Argentina
at the time.48 Sigmund Freuds Die Traumdeutung (The
Interpretation of Dreams) (1900) was translated into Spanish
48 Stern produced 140 photomontages
for Idilio, of which forty-six negatives and

twenty-five vintage prints survive. She
revised seven of the photomontages she
published in Idilio for her own purposes.
49 Cecilia Taiana, The Emergence of
Freuds Theories in Argentina, Canadian
Journal of Psychoanalysis 14, no. 2 (Fall
2006): p. 291. 50 Although womens
suffrage was granted in Argentina in
34
1949, women continued to face systemic

gender repression. In an interview
published in 1983, Butelman recounted
his recollections of the collaboration
with Germani and Stern. The interview
was reprinted in Priamo, Grete Stern,
p. 186, where Priamo comments on
the division of labor between Butelman
and Germani: Germani was responsible
for communicating with Stern about
in 1923, and the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA),

the first such association in Latin America, was founded in
1942. Four of the APAs six founding membersGuillermo
Ferrari Hardoy (brother of the architect), Marie Langer,
Arnaldo Rascovsky, and Enrique Pichon-Rivirewere close
friends of Stern. All were in opposition to Peronism, in which
they perceived the same dangers they had formerly identified in fascism. Psychologist Cecilia Taiana notes that in the
1940s, with intermittent dictatorships wary of the potential
of psychoanalysis to influence the public mind, the field was
forced to grow outside established institutions, creating
linkages with artistic and antifascist groups, yet it found a
popular outlet in Idilio, where its inclusion alongside romantic photonovellas and the like failed to excite government
suspicion.49 Edited under the collective pseudonym Richard
Rest by two prominent intellectuals who were blacklisted
from the university by the Peronist governmentpsychologist
and publisher Enrique Butelman and his associate Gino
Germani, founder of modern sociology in Argentinathe
column provided psychoanalytic views on the dreams and
anxieties of modern women who had been mobilized to
social ascendance by the unfulfilled promises of Peronism.50
Butelman and Germani developed a questionnaire for the
magazines readers, promising to interpret and elucidate
their dreams. These were published as: dreams of obstacles, dreams of discontent, dreams of dolls, anxiety
dreams, dreams of mirrors, mask dreams, dreams of
cosmic disasters, photography dreams, and so on.
Each week Butelman and Germani analyzed one
dream, which was published with a photomontage by Stern
(figs. 16, 17). Stern, however, did not provide a direct
illustration of Butelman and Germanis psychoanalytical text.
Instead, she opted for a fundamentally feminist commentary
on it.51 Using the ruptures of montage to powerful political
effect in reaction to the growing strength of Peronism, Sterns
pictures amount to a repository of personal, even intimate
details about womens livesmarriage, society, domesticity,
labor, and sexualitywithin a patriarchal society. Scholar
Ana Mara Len suggests that Sterns photomontages operated as mediators between the experts (mostly men) and
the primarily female audience presumed to be the typical
readers of Idiliothat wasassumed in need of instruction
and guidance.52 Courting the same narrative compression
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the photomontages, while Butelman

drafted the responses to Idilios readers.
This may explain why Stern, in her
own recollections of the process from
1967, does not appear to comment
on Butelmans involvement. See Stern,
Notes on Photomontage, in this volume.
51 Germani often provided guidelines for
how he envisioned the photomontage.
Stern was able to incorporate these
suggestions, often while simultaneously

subverting his intentions. 52 Ana Mara
Len, Dreams of Buenos Aires: Grete
Sterns Images for Bajo Belgrano and
Idilio, 1948, paper presented at the
Scholars Day From Bauhaus to Buenos
Aires.
35
Fig 16 Photomontage
illustration by Grete Stern as

it appeared in Richard Rest
(Enrique Butelman and Gino
Germani), El psicoanlisis
le ayudar (Psychoanalysis
Will Help You). Idilio 17
(March 15, 1949): p. 2
(see pl. 95). Collection Diran
Sirinian, Buenos Aires
Fig 17 Photomontage
illustration by Grete Stern as

it appeared in Richard Rest
(Enrique Butelman and Gino
Germani), El psicoanlisis
le ayudar (Psychoanalysis
Will Help You). Idilio 39
(August 16, 1949): p. 2
(see pl. 7). Collection Diran
Sirinian, Buenos Aires
and sense of displacement found in dreams, Sterns oneiric

syntax reveals a chain of political and psychological associations. Yet it also provides a critical look into Sterns feminist
strategies as she amplified or distorted the masculine readings of womens dreams infavorof a gendered discourse.In
other words, Len argues, Stern complicated the rise of
fields of expertise in the postwarperiodwith the subversive
voice of those outside these power positions.53
Sterns photomontages, which during the mid-1950s
were also presented as a series at the psychology department of the Universidad de La Plata, intermix scraps from her
vast picture archive with shots of female models that include
as protagonists her daughter, friends, and neighbors. She
approached her assignments through a filmmakers lens, delivering an entire narrative within a single frame. The central
figure of her photomontages was female (the dreamer), and
the situation one of conflict. Her cinematic images give voice
to the hidden desires and repressions expressed in womens
dreams. In Sueo No. 1: Artculos elctricos para el hogar
(Dream No. 1: Electrical Appliances for the Home) (pl. 78),
an elegantly dressed woman is converted into a domestic
table lamp that waits to be turned on by a male hand,
electricity here employed as a sexual pun to expose feminine objectification. In Sueo No. 6: Sin ttulo (Dream No.
6: Untitled) (pl. 83), a minuscule woman travels between
two shelved rows of books, uncannily placing strawberries
on top of them. The books titles, including one published
by Sur, are invariably by male authors: John Dos Passos,
T. E. Lawrence, Lin Yutang, Walter de la Mare, etc., thus
calling attention to the invisibility of women in the literary
world. Particularly intriguing are the photomontages in which
maternal images are disclosed as threatening. In Sueo
No. 24: Sorpresa (Dream No. 24: Surprise) (pl. 95), Stern
returned to themes that she first addressed at ringl + pit. A
female protagonist hides her face in shock as she confronts a
larger-than-life baby doll advancing toward her. Her reaction
provokes a rupture with the good patriarchal mother, disclosing a feeling of fright, even repulsion toward the child.54
From her early years of Kleinian analysis with Heimann,
Stern learned that the political intention of psychoanalysis lay
with aggression as much as with desire.55 Several dreams
represent imprisonment, such as Sueo No. 45: Sin ttulo
(Dream No. 45: Untitled) (pl. 105), in which a middle-class
53 Ibid. 54 The expression good

patriarchal mother is taken from Mignon
Nixons discussion of Louise Bourgeoiss
work, in Nixon, Fantastic Reality: Louise
Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2005),
p. 79. 55 Jacqueline Rose, Negativity
in the Work of Melanie Klein, in Why
War? Psychoanalysis, Politics, and
the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford,
36
U.K.: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 14344.
56 It is quite possible that Stern would
have read Joan Rivieres influential text

Womanliness as Masquerade, which
was published in the International Journal
of Psychoanalysis in 1929. From 1916 to
1920, Riviere was in analysis with Ernest
Jones, whom Stern knew and who referred
Stern to Heimann. Riviere also underwent
analysis with Melanie Klein and worked
housewife is enclosed in a living-room cage. Debunking fantasies about womens lives, Stern plumbed the depths of her
own experience as mother and artist to negotiate the terms
between blissful domesticity and entrapment, privacy and
exposure, cultural sexism and intellectual rebellion. Behind a
layer of playfulness, her work mobilizes a form of resistance
to the pleasures and discontents of gender predicaments in
mid-century Argentine society.
Investing her work with psychoanalytic feminism, Stern
succeeded in representing a new postwar feminine type:
a figure struggling to tweak authority and free herself from
the ideology of marriage, the dynamics of sexual machismo,
and the burdens of motherhood.56 In one forward-thinking
photomontage after another, she examines womens dreams
with urgency and surreal wit. Her Bauhaus background in typography, design, and advertising culture met the Borgesian
sensibility of narrativity and rupture of her adopted country.
Stern claimed a position against the grain, contesting the
social hierarchies of patriarchy and cultural taboos in the
representation of women. From her early beginnings in
Germany, she expanded the traditional boundaries of fine
artwhether through product photography, photobooks,
architectural pictures, or photomontages.57 The encounter
of avant-garde aesthetics and exploration of the female
unconscious advanced in her later practice confirms Stern as
a critical figure in the crossbred history of photography and
feminist psychoanalysis that gave focus to a new genderpolitical discourse in Argentinaand, indeed, to the nascent
transnational history of modern art.
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closely with her, as did Heimann after

her own arrival in London in 1934. 57
Indeed, although this exhibition concludes
with the end of the Peron era, Stern
would continue her rich activity into the
mid-1980s. From 1956 until 1970, she
directed a photography workshop at
the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes,
and in 1964 she obtained a grant from
the Fondo Nacional de las Artes and
traveled through the Chaco province in

northeast Argentina, producing more
than 800 anthropographic pictures of the
aboriginals in the region, which remains
the most significant photographic archive
on this subject in Argentina. She continued
her studio practice until 1980 and was
embraced as an influential teacher by
younger generations. She died in Buenos
Aires on December 24, 1999.
Grete Stern Plates
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Plate 13
ringl + pit
ringl mit Brille (ringl with Glasses). 1929
Plate 14
ringl + pit
Ellen Auerbach. c. 1928
Gelatin silver print, 8 38 6" (21.2 15.3 cm)
38
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Plate 15
Walter Peterhans. 1927
Plate 16
ringl + pit
Walter and Ellen Auerbach. 1931
Gelatin silver print, 7 12 9 1316" (19 25 cm)
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Plate 17
Horacio Coppola. c. 1932
Plate 18
ringl + pit
Das Raucher (The Smoker). 1931

Plate 19
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Walter and Ellen Auerbach, London. 1935
Private collection
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Plate 20
Untitled. c. 1928
Gelatin silver print, 8 1116 6 12" (22 16.5 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Fernando Molina Bello
Plate 21
ringl + pit
Goggi. 1929
Gelatin silver print, 3 916 2 14" (9 5.8 cm; here shown larger)
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d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 22
ringl + pit
Bernhard Minetti. 1930

Plate 23
ringl + pit
Untitled. 193035
Gelatin silver print, 6 516 7" (16 17.8 cm)
Plate 24
ringl + pit
Kahlkopf (Bald Head) [Heinrich Clasing]. 1930
Gelatin silver print, 6 516 6 78" (16.1 17.4 cm; here shown larger)
The Art Institute of Chicago. Restricted gift of the Photographic Society
46
47
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 25
ringl + pit
Handschuh (Glove). 1929
Gelatin silver print, 8 116 6"
(20.5 15.3 cm)

Plate 26
ringl + pit
Kpfe (Heads). 1931
Gelatin silver print, printed later,
9 316 10 716" (23.3 26.5 cm)
Plate 27
ringl + pit
Fragment einer Braut (Fragment of a Bride). 1930
Gelatin silver print, 6 12 8 1116" (16.5 22 cm)
48
49
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 28
ringl + pit
Dents. c. 1934
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Ford Motor Company Collection,
Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell
Plate 29
ringl + pit
Komol. 1931
50
51
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 30
ringl + pit
Hut und Handschuhe (Hat and Gloves). 1930
Plate 31
ringl + pit
Ptrole Hahn. 193133
52
53
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 32
ringl + pit
Claire Eckstein mit Lippenstift (Claire Eckstein with Lipstick). 1930
Plate 33
ringl + pit
Claire Eckstein, Reversed. 1930
54
55
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 34
ringl + pit
Das Ei des Columbus (Columbuss Egg). 1930
Plate 35
ringl + pit
Maratti. Kunstseide (Maratti. Artificial Silk). 1931
56
57
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 36
ringl + pit
Rotbart (Red Beard). 1931
Gelatin silver print, 538 x 81516" (13.7 x 22.7 cm)
Plate 37
ringl + pit
Seifenlauge (Soapsuds). 1930
Gelatin silver print, 7 x 6 14"
(17.8 x 15.9 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Acquired through the generosity of Roxann Taylor
Plate 38
ringl + pit
ringl in Tub. 1931
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Latin American and Caribbean Fund
58
59
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 39
ringl + pit
Zigaretten Gldenring (Gldenring Cigarettes). 1930
Plate 40
ringl + pit
Das Korsett (The Corset). 1930
60
61
Plate 41
ringl + pit
Berlin. 1930
4 716 3 516" (11.2 8.4 cm)
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 43
ringl + pit
Ernst. 1931
Plate 42
ringl + pit
Untitled. 193033
5 78 x 8 1116" (15 x 22 cm)
Carl Jacobs Fund
Plate 44
ringl + pit
Berliner Strassenfotograf (Berlin Street Photographer). 1930
62
63
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 45
Helene Weigel. 1933
Plate 46
Bertolt Brecht. 1934
64
65
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 47
Karl Korsch. 1934
Plate 48
Dr. Paula Heimann. c. 1935
66
67
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 49
Cover for Kunst und Knstler (Art and Artist). 1928
Offset lithograph, 12 316 91316" (31 25 cm)
68
69
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 50
D.L.H. 1925
Photocollage, 8 716 6 516" (21.5 16 cm)
Plate 51
MER Fahrplan (MER Schedule). 1926
Photocollage, 9 14 6 1116" (23.5 17 cm)
70
71
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 52
H33. c. 1925
Ink and pencil on paper,
12 58 9 1316" (32 25 cm)

Plate 53
Advertisement for Bostanjoglo No. 7,
Russian Cigarettes. c. 1928
Gravure, 4 1516 7 116"
(12.5 18 cm)
Plate 54
ringl + pit
Heliocitin. 1931
Offset lithograph, 5 78 4 18" (15 10.5 cm)

Plate 55
Advertisement for Sharp, Perrin, & Co. Ltd. 1935
Offset lithograph, 12 1316 9" (32.6 22.9 cm)
72
73
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 56
ringl + pit
Spread from Ringlpitis. 1931
Artist book with collage, 15 x 22 18"
(38.1 x 56.2 cm)
74
75
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 57
Autorretrato con flor (Self-Portrait with Flower). 1937
Gelatin silver print, printed 1958, 11 9 116" (28 23 cm)
76
77
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 58
Autorretrato (Self-Portrait ). 1935
Gelatin silver print, printed 1956, 15 34 11 716" (40 29 cm)
Plate 59
Autorretrato (Self-Portrait ). 1943
Gelatin silver print, printed 1958, 8 1116 11" (22 28 cm)
78
79
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 60
Gertrudis Chale. 1938
Gelatin silver print, 15 38 11 14"
(39 28.5 cm)
Plate 61
Antonio Berni. 1947
(21.5 28 cm)
Plate 62
Jorge Luis Borges. 1951
80
81
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 63
Gyula Kosice. 1945
Plate 64
Diyi Laa. 1945
82
83
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 65
Amparo Alvajar. 1942

Plate 66
Lino Eneas Spilimbergo. 1937
Plate 67
Isidro Maiztegui. c. 1940
Gelatin silver print, 11116 8 1116" (28.1 22 cm)

Plate 68
Mara Elena Walsh. 1947
Gelatin silver print, 11 9 1316" (28 25 cm)
84
85
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 69
Pablo Neruda. 1945
Gelatin silver print, printed 1994, 16 18 11 516" (41 28.7 cm)

Plate 70
Dr. Marie Langer. 1945
Gelatin silver print, 9 116 x 7 116" (23 x 18 cm)
Plate 71
Manuel ngeles Ortiz. 1943
86
87
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N

Plate 72
Mony Hermelo. 1943
Plate 73
Jos Luis Romero. 1947

Plate 74
Clment Moreau. 1942
88
89
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 75
Letra A (Letter A). c. 1940

Plate 76
Campo Grafico. 1937
Plate 77
Photomontage for Mad, Ramos Meja, Argentina. 194647
Latin American and Caribbean Fund and partial gift of Mauro Herlitzka
90
91
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 78
Sueo No. 1: Artculos elctricos para el hogar
(Dream No. 1: Electrical Appliances for the Home). 1949
Gelatin silver print, 10 12 x 9" (26.6 x 22.9 cm)
through gift of Marie-Jose and Henry R. Kravis in honor of Adriana Cisneros de Griffin
92
93
Plate 79
Sueo No. 2: En el andn
(Dream No. 2: On the Platform). 1949
Gelatin silver print, printed 1992,
7 1116 11 716" (19.5 29 cm)
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 80
Sueo No. 3: Sin ttulo
(Dream No. 3: Untitled). 1949
Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s,
8 116 11" (20.5 28 cm)
Collection Eduardo F. Costantini,
Buenos Aires
Plate 81
Sueo No. 4: Sirena de agua dulce
(Dream No. 4: Freshwater Mermaid). 1950
94
95
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
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r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 82
Sueo No. 5: Botella del mar
(Dream No. 5: Bottle from the Sea). 1950
9 716 11 1316" (24 30 cm)

Plate 83
Sueo No. 6: Sin ttulo (Dream No. 6: Untitled). 1948
11 1316 9 716" (30 24 cm)
Plate 84
Sueo No. 8: Hemisferios (Dream No. 8: Hemispheres). 1949
Collection Anna Gamazo de Abell, Madrid

Plate 85
Sueo No. 10: Cuerpos celestes (Dream No. 10: Celestial Bodies). 1949
96
97
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 86
Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s, 9 516 11 716" (23.7 29 cm)
Plate 87
Sueo No. 11: Flor nio
(Dream No. 11: Flower Child). 1948
Gelatin silver print, printed c. 1965,
11 1316 11 1316" (30 30 cm)

Plate 88
Sueo No. 13: Consentimiento
(Dream No. 13: Consent). 1949
151516 1878" (40.5 48 cm)
98
99
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 89
Sueo No. 14: Angustia (Dream No. 14: Anguish). 1949
Plate 90
Sueo No. 16: Sirena del mar (Dream No. 16: Mermaid). c. 1950
100
101
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 91
Sueo No. 18: Caf Concert
(Dream No. 18: Caf Concert). 1948
13 78 19 12" (35.2 49.5 cm)

Plate 92
Sueo No. 19: Sin ttulo
(Dream No. 19: Untitled). 1949
9 716 11 34" (24 29.8 cm)
Plate 93
Sueo No. 20: Perspectiva (Dream No. 20: Perspective). 1949
102
103
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
r
r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
o
c
f
i
l
b
d
e Pu
s
a
r
e
o
l
f
e
d
R
e
F
d
PD Inten
t
o
N
Plate 94
Sueo No. 22: ltimo beso (Dream No. 22: Last Kiss). 1949
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Vital Projects Fund, Robert B. Menschel
Plate 95
Sueo No. 24: Sorpresa (Dream No. 24: Surprise). 1949
104
105
ly
n
O ion
n
o but
i
t
a
i
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r
t
e
s
i
d
i
s eD
n
o
d
i
C
W
w
r
ie n o
v
e tio
R
r
a
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c
f
i
l
b
d
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Plate 96
Sueo No. 25: Barquito de papel (Dream No. 25: Paper Boat). 1949
Plate 97
Sueo No. 26: El ojo eterno (Dream No. 26: The Eternal Eye). c. 1951
Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s, 9 716 9 14" (24 23.5 cm)
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107
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Plate 98
Sueo No. 27: No destie con el agua (Dream No. 27: Does Not Fade with Water). 1951
Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s, 11 716 9 116" (29 23 cm)
Plate 99
Sueo No. 28: Amor sin ilusin (Dream No. 28: Love Without Illusion). 1951
108
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Plate 100
Sueo No. 30: En esta hora (Dream No. 30: At This Time). c. 1951
Plate 101
Sueo No. 31: Made in England (Dream No. 31: Made in England). 1950
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Plate 102
Sueo No. 36: Fracturas (Dream No. 36: Fractures). 1949
Collection Alexis Fabry, Paris
Plate 103
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Plate 105
Plate 104
Sueo No. 44: La acusada (Dream No. 44: The Accused). 1948
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Twentieth-Century Photography Fund
Plate 106
Sueo No. 46: Extraamiento (Dream No. 46: Estrangement). 1948
114
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What the Eye Does Not See: The

Photographic Vision of Horacio Coppola
Sarah Hermanson Meister
In the pantheon of artists who defined the potential of modernist photography, the name Horacio Coppola might not spring
to mind. This is due, in large part, to the fact that his personal
and artistic history is intricately linked to the city of Buenos
Aires: to date, precious few artists active in the Southern
Hemisphere have been accorded such recognition.1 And yet,
the cultural circles in which Coppola was active throughout his
young adulthood were both sophisticated in their own right
and attuned to avant-garde movements in literature, painting,
architecture, and film around the world, so Coppola was in
no way an artistic naf operating in isolation, and his photographic achievements, while under-known, compare favorably
with many figures whose iconic images are as familiar as
their names: Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ilse Bing,
and Manuel lvarez Bravo, to name but a few. Coppolas
photographs made in his native Buenos Aires and during his
nearly three-year sojourn in Europe in the early 1930s reveal
a profoundly personal style articulated through mechanical
meansa hallmark of modernist photography. Embracing
unembellished yet unsuspected vistas, and celebrating the
vibrant today of cities that had weathered centuries, Coppola
demonstrated how a camera could be a tool of artistic expression. In the same way that Brassa and Germaine Krull made
their names synonymous with Paris, or Bill Brandt with London,
or Berenice Abbott with New Yorkfor each, simultaneously
defining the unique characteristics of a city and a personal
visionthe heart of Coppolas achievement rests with his photographs of Buenos Aires, whose distinctive rhythms, landmarks,
and idiosyncrasies come to life in his images. With the same
cosmopolitan spirit that imbued Coppolas education and upbringing, it is time to put his accomplishments in dialogue with
the broader cultural circles with which we are more familiar.
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My sincere thanks to Rachel Kaplan
for her invaluable research assistance,
insights, and her translation of a number
of Spanish-language sources here.
1 Josep Vicent Monz, ed., El Buenos
Aires de Horacio Coppola (Valencia:
IVAM, Centro Julio Gonzalez, 1996)
and Horacio Coppola. Fotografa
(Madrid: Fundacin Telefnica, 2008)
are two major monographs with English
Horacio Coppola. Detail plate 180
117
translations, yet the first substantive

discussion of Coppola in a widely
distributed English-language publication
is Martin Parr and Gerry Badgers
discussion of Coppolas Buenos Aires
in The Photobook: A History, vol. II
(London: Phaidon, 2006). My thanks to
Noam Elcott at Columbia University for
his perspective in exploring the ways
in which Coppola has existed outside
Coppolas early self-portraits signal an experimental impulse without obvious precedent in Argentina (fig. 1). Buenos
Aires had robust amateur photography circles, but the work
produced within them has a decidedly more traditional
character. No one else in Buenos Aires in the 1920s (and
very few people in the world) were toying with the basic
properties of light, glass, and silver, constructing images
from elements found around the home (lenses from a pair of
glasses, a prism, a lamp). Coppola recognized himself in
this arrangement of abstract forms, and his decision to refer
to it as a self-portrait underscores his desire to align himself
with the new.2 The image is simultaneously childlike (a caricature of a human face) and avant-garde (in its asymmetry,
its abstraction, and in Coppolas decision to print it both as
light-on-dark and the reverse): a radical gesture for a young
man on the cusp of identifying his own artistic ambition.
Coppolas career also stands out for the sophistication
and ambition of his achievements in critical thinking and filmmaking. In the United States, only Walker Evans and Alfred
Stieglitz dedicated comparable attention to analyzing and
promoting the work of fellow visual artists (while pursuing their
own art), and in Europe, one might argue that Lszl MoholyNagy and Franz Roh sought to articulate theoretical positions
with a similarly broad range through their own art and their
investigation of others. Coppolas peers with commensurate
talent in both photography and filmmaking might be limited to
Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand (who collaborated on the experimental film Manhatta in 1921) and, in Europe, Man Ray
(who directed several key Surrealist films in the 1920s), but
in its breadth and range, Coppolas production is distinctive.
His commitment to filmas a writer, thinker, and director
manifests itself across his career, conceptually, structurally,
and visually. Although Coppolas artistic identity was centered
around his photographic practice, his engagement with a
broad range of contemporary activity resulted in a sphere of
influence that transcended material boundaries.
The 1920s were as heady and prosperous in Argentina as

they were in the United States and Europe. The economy
boomed thanks to foreign investments, exports, and immigration, strengthening national industries and reducing
photographys traditional canons. 2 In

a 1994 autobiographical text, Coppola
described the creation of this image, with
characteristic dramatic flair making up
for whatever details might have faded in
the intervening decades: And in 1928
I got hold of a classical bellows camera
for 18 x 24 [cm] negatives. Loading
flat film into the camera chassis. When
did I decide to place two circular lenses
from a pair of glasses on the round

cardboard disc, instead of the lens that
[my brother] Armando didnt bring me?
A little filament lamp stood opposite
the camera, gleaming beautifully in the
unpolished glass. Years ago, Daddy had
brought a glass prism home from the
factory32 cm long and 31 x 31 mm
in cross section. It was just a fragment,
and one end was chipped. When did I
decide to set it on its end between the

light and the camera? Inside, I could see
a starry sky with a geometrical structure.
And when did the cardboard disc slip
round, letting several beams of light
filter in, to simulatewith the double
image of the lampmy self-portrait?
Autobiographical text, in Horacio
Coppola. Fotografa, first published in
Coppola, Imagema. Antologa fotogrfia
118
19271994 (Buenos Aires: Fondo

Nacional de las ArtesEdiciones de la
Llanura, 1994), p. 372. This text has
served as the foundation for much that
is known about Coppolas life. Patricia
M. Artundos helpful chronology,
also published in Horacio Coppola.
Fotografa (pp. 36066), supplements
Coppolas account with a range of
primary and secondary research. Many
Many of the strongest influences on the development of

Coppolas vision in these early years reflected the activities
facilitated by the Asociacin Amigos del Arte, a private
institution led by the cultural and social elite of Buenos Aires
and dedicated to promoting both local and international
trends in contemporary art, literature, architecture, and
music.8 From its founding in 1924 until it closed its doors
in 1942, the Amigos del Arte provided Coppola and many
others access to a distinguished roster of local and international writers, philosophers, and artists. Among its countless
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Fig 1 Horacio Coppola. Self-Portrait. 1928. Gelatin silver print, 7 938" (18 24 cm). Private collection, London
dependence on foreign imports. Buenos Aires saw a rise

in population throughout the 1920s, leading to the citys
expansion and continuous construction projects. Arts institutions and literary publications, such as the Amigos del Arte
and the journal Martn Fierro, both founded in 1924, were
critical to fostering a cultural avant-garde. Horacio Coppola
was young, but he was at the center of this incredibly vibrant
cultural moment: before his twenty-fifth birthdayJuly 31,
1931two of his photographs were included in the biography of Evaristo Carriego written by the heralded (if not yet
famous) Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges; his photographs
and critical writing were published in Clave de Sol, a shortlived but noteworthy arts journal (Coppola was a founding
architecture, and philosophy was an uncontested virtue.

Coppolas secondary-school teacher, Roberto Giusti, had
been a founder of the influential cultural journal Nosotros,
suggesting the quality of Coppolas education and his
exposure to leading cultural critics, even at a young age. He
learned the basics of photography from his eldest brother,
Armando, a dentist by profession but a recognized painter
and amateur photographer.4 While still a teenager, Coppola
was befriending philosophers, artists, and critical thinkers,
and avidly reading Martn Fierro (to which Borges regularly
contributed) as well as philosophical and critical journals
from Spain (Jos Ortega y Gassets Revista de Occidente),
Italy (Benedetto Croces Crtica), and elsewhere. And although there were numerous amateur photography societies
and magazines in Buenos Aires, his choice to avoid these is
of particular note.5 Coppola was personable, bright, curious,
and well connected: his professional path, if somewhat
meandering, reflects his wide-ranging interests, and sufficient
material support to pursue them.
Coppolas first photographs, made in 1927 with
Armandos large-format camera (and, after 1928, his
own), reveal an optical curiosity completely out of sync with
prevailing trends in Argentina.6 Eschewing the cameras
capacity to accurately render the details of the visible world,
Coppola instead explored its potential to complicate traditional understandings of pictorial space. This was a hallmark
of the photographic avant-garde in Europe of the 1920s,
although there is no evidence that he would have had access
to this work before his first trip to Europe in 1930 (despite
his attentiveness to the leading critical thinkers in Italy and
Spain). Coppola was interested in the effects of light, prisms,
and glass for their visual and metaphoric potential, much
as Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy were in their photograms,
yet unlike their work, Coppolas subject is captured with a
camera and almost always identifiable, drawn from objects
that were a familiar part of his everyday life (pls. 107, 108).
His photographs resonate strongly with Germaine Krulls
unexpected cropping, framing, and perspectives in her
collection Mtal, published in Paris in 1928 (fig. 2). The
two artists also shared a particular attentiveness to film and
to the experimental techniques of montage, juxtaposition,
and cropping that characterized avant-garde activity in both
photography and film in the late 1920s.7
member of the editorial board); he had cofounded the Cine

Club de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires Film Club); and plans
were underway for a suite of his photographs of his hometown to appear in Sur, the singularly influential literary and
cultural journal that had been recently founded by Victoria
Ocampo. Thus, while Coppolas trips to Europe in 1930 and
1932 were transformative in many ways, his artistic foundation was solidly in place well before he set sail.3
Horacio Coppola was born in 1906, the youngest of
six children of two Italian-born parents. His family lived on
the central thoroughfare of Calle Corrientes, in a house built
by his father. Coppola benefitted from a broad and liberal
education, where being well versed in music, literature, art,
of the biographical details regarding

Coppola that follow are drawn from these
two sources. 3 On the subject of Coppola
having been born modern, see Jorge
Schwartz, Foundation of Buenos Aires:
The Vision of Horacio Coppola, in
Horacio Coppola. Fotografa, pp. 338
43 (English translation); and Luis Priamo,
El Joven Coppola, in Horacio Coppola:
Los Viajes (Buenos Aires: Galera Jorge
MaraLa Ruche; Madrid: Crculo de

Bellas Artes, 2009), pp. 520.
4 The Museo de Bellas Artes in
Buenos Aires owns six of Armando

Coppolas paintings and organized a
joint exhibition of the brothers work
in 2006 on the occasion of Horacios
100th birthday. In 1953, Galeria
Krayd exhibited Armandos paintings,
for which Edith Gay wrote a richly
illustrated review in Ver y Estimar 9,
nos. 33/34 (December 1953): pp.
119
4251. 5 In this statement, and many

others describing the cultural scene in
Buenos Aires in the 1920s and 1930s,
I reveal my profound indebtedness to
Jodi Roberts. While Robertss essay for
this catalogue addresses the points of
intersection in Coppolas and Sterns
careers, her research, with which she
has been exceedingly generous, extends
far beyond that topic. 6 Coppola was
Fig 2 Germaine Krull. Untitled. 192728. Gelatin silver print, 9 6" (22.9
15.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection.
Gift of Thomas Walther
nearly 106 years old when he passed

away, allowing for plenty of time to
distill his earliest photographic activities.
By my count, there are fewer than fifty
photographs remaining today that
Coppola made before he purchased
his 35mm Leica. 7 Krulls husband was
the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, and she
participated in the production of his
1929 film De Brug (The Bridge).
8 See Patricia M. Artundo and Marcelo E.

Pacheco, Amigos del Arte: 19241942
(Buenos Aires: MalbaFundacin
Costantini, 2008).
Fig 3 Coppolas photograph Esquina en las antiguas orillas, Calle Paraguay al 2600
(Corner in the Old Outskirts of the City, 2600 Calle Paraguay) (1929) as published
in Jorge Luis Borgess Evaristo Carriego (Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer, 1930). Collection
Sergio Alberto Baur, Buenos Aires
programs, the group sponsored the ten celebrated lectures

by Le Corbusier in 1929, which Coppola described as
having had a decisive influence on my way of seeing the
city.9 Le Corbusier was ultimately quite critical of Buenos
Aires, but he identified a modernist idiom in the simplified
forms of its vernacular domestic structures that clearly resonated with the young photographer.10
It was also in 1929 when Coppola strolled through the
city with Borges, who shared a fascination with the distinctive character of architecture on the fringes of the city, the
threshold where the urban space dissolved into the Pampas,
the vast, fertile plains that feature prominently both in the
agriculture and the imagination of Argentina.11 Borges chose
two of Coppolas photographs to illustrate his biography of
the Argentine poet Evaristo Carriego (fig. 3), images that
highlight aspects of the native architecture: low structures
with enclosed courtyards, unembellished expanses of wall,
and a sense of balance between earth and sky that situates
these poorer suburbs between the more densely populated
urban core and the surrounding plains. Luis Priamo has
observed that Coppola made these photographs with an
inexpensive camera, which accounts for the imperfect focus
and peripheral deformation of the images. When, in 1936,
Coppola returned to the same spot to rephotograph one
of these images with his Leica, he achieved a technically
9 Coppola, quoted in Horacio Coppola:

testimonios, interview between Adrin
Gorelik and Horacio Coppola, Punta
de Vista 53 (November 1995): pp. 21,
23, 25 (English translation, Horacio
Coppola. Fotografa, pp. 37778).
In 1994, Coppola remembered being
introduced to Le Corbusier in Paris in
early 1931: We recalled his lectures
at Amigos del Arte, and his survey
120
of Buenos Aires, on which my future

photographs would be based. Coppola,
autobiographical text, p. 373. 10 See Le
Corbusier, Precisions on the present state
of architecture and city planning, trans.
Edith Schreiber Aujame (Cambridge,
Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991). 11 For
a thoughtful analysis of the influence
of both Borges and Le Corbusier on
Coppolas thinking, see Adrin Gorelik,
superior result, yet the flaws of earlier images allow for a

more allusive interpretation that Borges certainly enjoyed.12
If Coppola was an avid, if passive, participant at the
lectures sponsored by the Amigos del Arte, his role was
more central in other cultural arenas. Coppola was one of
the founders and secretary of the steering committee of the
Cine Club de Buenos Aires, which held its weekly meetings
in the auditorium of the Amigos del Arte.13 There were fifteen
sessions from August 21 to November 27, 1929, and the
program, organized thematically, screened films from such
international talents as Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov,
Paul Leni, Charlie Chaplin, and Man Ray. This would mark
the beginning of Coppolas critical engagement with film:
Looking back again over the years, watching films was the
basis of my own training as a self-taught artist. . . . It was
my subject, and I studied it with passion, laying bare its
innermost secrets.14
In 1930, Coppola joined with musician Isidro
Maiztegui, historian Jos Luis Romero, and the emerging
critic Jorge Romero Brest to found the cultural review Clave
de Sol, heir to the literary legacy of Martn Fierro and
precursor to Victoria Ocampos Sur, which would emerge
the following year. Clave de Sol was short lived (only two
issues were published, in September 1930 and May 1931),
but it provided an important platform for Coppolas visual
and critical thinking. In the first issue, he wrote an essay on
the distinction between avant-garde and modern art, as well
as a review of an exhibition of the painter Rafael Barradass
work in Rio de la Plata. In the former, titled Overcoming
the Polemic, Coppola plays the role of mediator between
what he describes as two antagonistic positions: the
avant-garde (the controversial movement supporting the
art of today, which defines itself solely in opposition to the
past) and the modern (the art of today, which embraces
the new but moves beyond a polemical position towards a
deeper understanding of that novelty).15 Coppola dedicated himself to the latter in his own work, utilizing a modern
medium (a camera) to explore issues of the self and the city
in modern life.
The second issue contained Coppolas essay On Film
and Its Expression: American Film as well as his photograph ngulo de escalera (Corner of a Staircase) (fig. 4).
The photographs complex web of intersecting lines and
planesin which the walls, doors, stair treads, and railings

in his parents home on Calle Corrientes are distilled beyond
recognitionis rendered even more abstract by Coppolas
decision to invert its orientation, so that the viewer is asked
to imagine what each elementworn paint, wood, metal
could possibly represent.16 Not only would this photograph
have surprised the magazines culturally elite audience (the
only reproduction in the first issue was of Barradass painting
Adoration of the Magi and the Shepherds), there is no evidence there was a precedent at the time for such an image
anywhere in Argentina. Given Coppolas attentiveness to
the newest currents in film, the most relevant context for work
such as thisand for Coppolas work made before his first
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Horacio Coppola, 1929: Borges, Le

Corbusier and the Casitas of Buenos
Aires, Horacio Coppola. Fotografa,
pp. 34954. 12 These photographs are
from a group of eighteen in Coppolas
archive marked Evaristo Carriego/
Borges, all gelatin silver contact prints
from 3.5-x-4.5-inch film negatives. Luis
Priamo has rightly observed that these
images fall into two categories: Arroyo
Maldonado (Maldonado Stream),

which feature structures on the outskirts of
the city, and Medianeras (air shafts),
which examine taller, central buildings,
the shift between the two signifying
the influence of Le Corbusiers lecture.
See Priamo, El Joven Coppola, pp.
57. 13 The other founders were Jorge
Romero Brest, Marino Casano, Leopoldo
Hurtado, Nstor Ibarra, Lon Klimovsky,
trip to Europe in 1930 in generalis logically avant-garde

cinema.17 Coppolas essay on American film addresses a full
range of approaches to the mediumfrom Charlie Chaplin
to Felix the Cat, D. W. Griffith to Douglas Fairbanksyet he
also uses this platform to investigate the relationship between
film and photography. He cites Waldo Frank (This new
creation direct from a formal world with the material existing
inside each of us, is that which I call an apocalyptic method) and Franz Roh (describing the way a camera creates
a mechanical transposition of the values of light, of depths,
and of structures of the forms), each of which suggests a
path for interpreting Coppolas photograph reproduced in
the same issue.
Fig 4 Coppolas photograph nguelo de escalera (Corner of a Staircase) (1929) as published in Clave de Sol 2 (1931). Collection Sergio Alberto Baur, Buenos Aires
and Jos Luis Romero. 14 Coppola,

autobiographical text, p. 371. 15 See
Rachel Kaplans English translation of
this text in this volume as well as her
translation of Coppolas text on American
film discussed subsequently. 16 Coppola
printed this image as a positive and
negative, and inverted its orientation
top to bottom and left to right. See plate
109 for a vastly different interpretation.
121
17 The use of the adjective avant-garde

in this essay, with the exception of
the context of the Clave de Sol article
mentioned above, conforms to a more
broadly accepted notion of avant-garde
as embracing a new or forward-looking
position, often but not always in
contradistinction to the past.
Fig 5 A page from the notebook of 35mm contact prints made by Coppola upon his
return to Buenos Aires from Europe in 1931, showing rolls nos. 15 and 16. Estate of
Horacio Coppola, Buenos Aires
Given Coppolas Italian heritage and his attentiveness to all

manifestations of the modern experience, it comes as no surprise that he would seek to visit Europe early in his career. He
embarked in December 1930, with an itinerary set by Alfredo
Guttero. The two had become friends the previous year, after
Coppola saw an exhibition of Gutteros work at the Amigos
del Arte and was inspired to write to the famed painter.18 The
ease with which Coppola befriended leading cultural figures in
Buenos Aires (and, before long, in Europe) speaks to his confidence, his amiable nature, and his thirst for a truly contemporary intellectual and aesthetic discourse. His relationships with
18 The story of a six-page letter from
Coppola to Guttero is typical of

Coppolas 1994 text; that is, likely but
unconfirmed. I hope that by drawing
attention to its source the appropriate
level of skepticism is invoked. In 1929,
Guttero had initiated the Nuevo Saln
through the Amigos del Arte, a milestone
that affirmed a new visual culture based
on new art and its premises. Artundo
122
philosophers (he was particularly close with Francisco Romero),

with writers such as Borges, artists such as Xul Solar, architects
such as Le Corbusier, and, perhaps most notably for its impact
on his life as a photographer, with Victoria Ocampo, inform
all aspects of his work, and are inextricably linked to its visual
character and cultural significance.
Gutteros itinerary brought Coppola through Italy,
Germany, France, and Spain. He connected with relatives in
Genoa, visited museums in Berlin, renewed his acquaintance
with Le Corbusier in Paris, and landed in Spain just after the
proclamation of the Second Republic. In Berlin he purchased
a Leica, the handheld small-format camera that had revolutionized photography in Europe in the late 1920s and similarly
transformed Coppolas practice. Francisco Romero had sent
Coppola a few copies of the first issue of Sur magazine,
published in January 1931, requesting that he share them
with anyone interested in Argentina.19 Through his travels
and underscored by Surs international bent, the young artists
vision was dramatically altered, and his Leica provided him
with the means of translating that vision into art.
Coppola returned to Buenos Aires in May 1931, and he
rushed to take advantage of the perspectives facilitated by his
newly purchased camera, shooting at least sixty-eight rolls of
film, which he carefully edited into a notebook of contact prints
(fig. 5). Freed from traditional points of view, Coppola extended his subjects beyond the edges of the frame, embracing the
potential of the Leica much as had avant-garde photographers
in Europe, whose work he likely encountered, at the very least,
at newsstands across the Continent. Moreover, Coppolas
attentiveness to figures such as Roh, who was articulating a
theoretical position for the modern possibilities of the medium,
undoubtedly infused the young photographers own practice.
Gutteros itinerary had placed photography, at best, as a
tangential point of interest, but upon Coppolas return to Buenos
Aires there was another critical figure in his artistic education
for whom photography was essential to avant-garde thinking:
Victoria Ocampo. Ocampo had positioned her new magazine as an avatar of the most important contemporary artistic
trends, and she chose seven of Coppolas recent photographs
of Buenos Aires to include in the fourth issue of Sur (fig. 6).
Introduced only by the title Seven Themes: Buenos Aires, they
present an insistently personal, idiosyncratic view of the city.
Despite the geographical anchors provided by the captions,
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Fig 6 Horacio Coppola. Siete temas: Buenos Aires (Seven Themes: Buenos Aires). Sur 4 (Spring 1931): n.p., insert. Estate of Horacio Coppola, Buenos Aires
and Pacheco, Amigos del Arte, p. 275.
19 Coppola, autobiographical text, p.
372.
123
these isolated elements and unusual viewpoints refuse to conform to recognizable aspects of the city. Upon seeing the view
of a tree and cornice reflected in a street puddle (pl. 113),
Borges exclaimed, This is Buenos Aires! (a comment that
Coppola later adopted as a title for the work).20
Coppola remained in Buenos Aires for less than eighteen

months before returning to Europe, with an eye towards a
longer sojourn. This time he identified Berlin as his primary
destination, and photography and film as his top priorities.21
His first port of call, as he recollected, was to seek out
a program in which he could study photography, which
eventually led to his introduction to Grete Stern. Through
her, he met Walter Peterhans, whose appointment at the
Bauhaus marked the formal integration of photography into
the schools curriculum, eclipsing the experimental fervor
that had been championed by Moholy-Nagy and embraced
by many others. Coppola began studying with Peterhans in
October 1932, after the Bauhaus had relocated from Dessau
to Berlin. Without a doubt, the precision of the photographs
Coppola is known to have made at the Bauhaus owes a debt
to Peterhanss masterful use of lighting to bring out the surface characteristics of the objects before his camera: the delicate lace petticoats and worn leather booties of a well-loved
doll (pl. 123); the varying luminosity of egg, twine, and
wood beneath a single source of light (pl. 122); or tender
flower petals contrasted against the rough warp and weft of
burlap (pl. 124). Another intriguing, yet undocumented, influence to imagine is that of Bauhaus instructor Josef Albers,
whose astounding suite of photocollages from 1929 to 1932
betrays a kinship with cinematic tropes. One of these collages (fig. 7) bears striking similarity to a nocturnal view of
a shop window Coppola would make back in Buenos Aires
(pl. 180). In all, Coppolas Bauhaus work demonstrates a
maturing technical confidence, complementing the increased
sophistication of his critical perspective on the medium.
After the Bauhaus closed in 1933, Coppola expanded
the scope of his Continental education in Germany and
Switzerland, with Georg Dehios handbook of German art as
his guide.22 He reunited with Stern in London by December,
and the two traveled together to Prague, Vienna, and
20 The fifth issue of Sur included an

insert with five additional photographs
by Coppola, including his first published
nocturnal view. 21 Coppola recalled
bringing a portfolio of my last five years
work to Europe to share with potential
instructors. I believe the prints reproduced
as plates 114, 115, 117, 118, 120,
and 121 were drawn from this small
binder, with 5-x-7-inch prints glued to
124
individual black pages. 22 As Coppola

later recalled: I stayed at youth hostels.
I went down into museum basements to
see modern art, and sometimes official
exhibitions like Degenerate Art. I took
my Leica and the Siemens 16mm movie
camera. Autobiographical text, p. 373.
While the now-infamous exhibition titled
Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) would
not open until 1937, Nazi hostility
huacos. Coppola was putting the lessons of craft he had

learned from Peterhans into practice, but additionally, he
was introduced to the demands of presenting a comprehensive overview of a subject, a prelude to his career-defining
Buenos Aires project the following year. His collaboration
with Zervos also proved a significant international platform for Coppola: the British sculptor Henry Moore wrote
a lengthy review of the Mesopotamian book, in which he
singled out Coppolas photographs as works that cannot
be overpraised.25
As work on the project commenced, Zervos published
an article in Cahiers dArt titled Nouvelles Photographies,
quoting Moholy-Nagys description of the medium as a
brilliant instrument of our optical education.26 The article
featured, not coincidentally, Grete Stern (as Ringl), Ellen
Rosenberg (as Pit), Walter Peterhans, and Coppola. In
his discussion of Coppola, Zervos traces the photographers
path to being a visual artist after he abandoned his studies
of law and philosophy, noting that in photography and
film, Coppola found a means of expression better suited to
his sensibility, through which he pursued an investigation
of the psychological value of his subjects. The article was
illustrated with two Peterhans still-life studies, two advertising
photographs by ringl + pit, and two of Coppolas Bauhaus
studies. Elsewhere in the magazine appeared Coppolas
portrait of Joan Mir. Despite the praise Zervos lavishes on
the medium, the article was only the second to address photography since the magazine was established in 1926. The
first was a richly illustrated article by Moholy-Nagy in 1929,
Photography as It Is /as It Ought to Be, which began with
his oft-quoted observation that it had been a hundred years
since photographys invention but that only recently had
it been truly discovered. Moholys embrace of visual play
certainly resonated with Coppolas experiments from 1929,
but by the time Coppola settled in London in 1934, he had
begun to explore an alternate, arguably subtler vein of the
photographic avant-garde of his day.
It was on the streets of the British capital where Coppola
began to incorporate a nod to Surrealism into his images.
While Man Ray was the photographer most notably associated with the movement, there were a number of talented
photographers in the early 1930s embracing photographys
potential to capture this aspect of the strange within the
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Fig 7 Josef Albers. Untitled (Shop-window mannequins). c. 1930. Gelatin silver

prints mounted on cardboard, 16 11" (40.6 29.2 cm). The Josef and
Anni Albers Foundation
Budapest in April. He met Christian Zervos, founder of the

distinguished gallery/publishing house Cahiers dArt and
publisher of the art journal of the same name. Zervos invited
Coppola to collaborate on a book of Mesopotamian art, for
which Coppola photographed extensively in the collections
of the British Museum and the Louvre. The luxurious resulting
volume, Lart de la Msopotamie, appeared in March 1935,
with Zervoss acknowledgment of Coppola as a most valued
collaborator.23 From the works of art reproduced in this
volume, Zervos wrote, he has created not only beautiful
photographs, but he has also brought forth, in a remarkable
fashion, the deep feeling that emerges from within them.24
The project provided Coppola an excellent opportunity
to expand his repertoire, and his talent for photographing
sculpture would serve him well a decade later when he
and Stern would collaborate on a series of photographs of
to modern art was hardly a secret in

Germany in 193334, a sentiment
Coppola vividly recalled. Following
the National Socialists rise to power,
there was a series of spontaneous
exhibitions of shame across Germany.
See Olaf Peters, From Nordau to Hitler:
Degeneration and Anti-Modernism
Between the Fin-de-Sicle and the
National Socialist Takeover, in Peters,
ed., Degenerate Art: The Attack on

Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937
(New York: Prestel and the Neue Galerie,
2014), pp. 1635. 23 Christian Zervos,
Lart de la Msopotamie (Paris: Cahiers
dArt, 1935), n.p. 24 Ibid.
25 Henry Moore, Mesopotamian

Art, The Listener, June 5, 1935: pp.
94446. 26 Christian Zervos, Nouvelles
Photographies, Cahiers dArt 9, nos.
14 (1934): pp. 7076. Here Zervos
quotes Moholy-Nagys 1929 article,
mentioned below. 27 The most noteworthy
attempts to situate Coppola within the
context of international photographic
modernism include Luis Priamo, El
125
Joven Coppola, and Natalia Brizuela,

Horacio Coppola y el Extraamiento de
lo Real, in Horacio Coppola: Los Viajes.
ordinary (Cartier-Bresson, Florence Henri, Andr Krtesz,

Dora Maar), and a number of Surrealist painters and poets
who identified this strain in artists who would have never
self-identified with the group (most notably, Eugne Atget).
Coppola was no stranger to Surrealism: as early as 1929
he was projecting films by Man Ray and Ren Clair to the
Cine Club de Buenos Aires, and his filmmaking, especially
in 1933, owes a good deal to their example. Yet beginning in
1934, his photographs, particularly those made in London,
reveal abiding interest in doubling, surrogates, mirrors,
and coincidence (pls. 131151), not unlike those of Manuel
lvarez Bravo (fig. 8), another photographer outside the
circle of artists associated with Surrealism who nevertheless
mined its creative potential in their work. There is no evidence
Coppola and lvarez Bravo ever met, yet their work reveals
a kindred attentiveness to contemporary artistic activity;
both would have been familiar with photographers such as
Cartier-Bresson and Atget.27 For an artist whose reputation
Fig 8 Manuel lvarez Bravo. Laughing Mannequins. 1930. Gelatin silver print, 7 38
9 716" (18.8 24 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase and partial
gift of Marianna Cook
has been so closely associated with a city never mentioned

in the context of photographic modernism, these connections
are essential to building an artistic framework through which
Coppolas career ought to be evaluated.
When Coppola arrived in Berlin in 1932, his first priority

was to find a photography program, but a close second
was to study filmmaking. He secured an apprenticeship and
attended a filmmaking course, and before long, equipped
with a Siemens 16mm movie camera, he was making his own
experimental films.28 He produced four between 1933 and
1936 (pls. 154157), each responding to different threads of
avant-garde filmmaking and reflecting both developments in
his own photography as well as his foundational experiences
with the film medium via his critical writings and the Cine Club
de Buenos Aires.
The first of these films, Der Traum (The Dream), bears
the strongest relationship to Surrealist filmmaking. As the
title suggests, a young man (played by Walter Auerbach,
who would soon marry Stern collaborator Ellen Rosenberg)
dreams of meeting a woman whose photograph appears on
the table beside his sleeping head. Capitalizing on the film
cameras capacity for illusion, Coppola cuts from a view of
Auerbach (initially surrounded by a glass, a loaf of bread,
a handful of small onions, a plate, and a knife) to animated
scenes featuring a bound musical score (Sterns photograph of Ellen appears between its pages), a wallet (with a
deutschemark inside), and a cabinet (containing a top hat
and a bowler)all of which soon magically replace the
food on the table. Auerbachs doppelganger (also played
by Auerbach) steals the top hat, photograph, and money,
and when the sleeping Auerbach awakes, he takes the only
remaining item (the bowler hat) and pursues the thief. After
a dramatic, if comical, chase, the original Auerbach is able
to knock the top hat off his doppelganger, at which point
the woman of his dreams (Rosenberg) appears by his side,
and they walk off together, arm in arm. The film is short
(2 minutes, 14 seconds) and playful, but it reveals Coppolas
attentiveness to the rich potential of dreams and doubling
and to the malleable nature of the visible world when seen
through the camera lens.
28 As Coppola recalled: I spent time
at the Tempelhof film studio, as a nonparticipating assistant during the making

of a film by Karl Frlich. Later, my attempt
to work as an assistant at the famous UFA
was frustrated when the Nazis came to
power. I also attended a course by the
Russian [sic: Bulgarian] director [Slatan]
Dudov at the Karl-Marx University.
Coppola, autobiographical text, p. 373.
126
29 Film historian David Oubias
excellent analysis of Coppolas films

appears as La piel del mundo: Horacio
Coppola y el cine, in Horacio Coppola:
Los Viajes, pp. 191210. 30 Un Muelle
del Sena is three and a half minutes long;
A Sunday on Hampstead Heath is nearly
nine minutes in length.
Coppolas next two films, Un Muelle del Sena (A Quai

on the Seine) (1934) and A Sunday on Hampstead Heath
(1935), are increasingly ambitious, using the film camera
alternately as a still camera and for its own unique capacity
to pan across a scene and to capture action.29 Un Muelle del
Sena opens with a view of a lamppost bearing a sign for the
Pont des Arts but soon examines the clochards (or homeless
men) along the Seine who were a common subject for photographers in Paris in the 1930s. Coppola weaves together
overall views from various perspectives with details of individual figures, stones, iron rings, chains, and trees. Far from a
straightforward documentary, and with no explicit narrative
structure, Coppola draws attention to his craft by the repetition
and juxtaposition of forms, and the movement between points
of view. Hinting at his ongoing interest in Surrealism, he explores the relation between animate and inanimate forms, and
the duality suggested by objects and their shadows. To underscore his intentionality, the artist concludes with the same shot
of the Pont des Arts lamppost but reversed in both tone and
orientation, so that what might have appeared as a simple
locating device becomes the structural bookend for the film.
A Sunday on Hampstead Heath represents the increased
seriousness of Coppolas engagement with the medium.30
In the first ten shots, we see mostly distant views of the
park; when human figures begin to appear, they gradually
increase in scale. As in Un Muelle del Sena, Coppola uses
juxtapositions of still images to explore specific sub-themes,
and the leisurely pace of Sunday seems well suited to these
investigations. With very few exceptions, the characters
in this film have their backs to the camera, perhaps signaling a bit of shyness on the part of Coppola, whose grasp
of English would have been quite rudimentary at the time.
Motifs of earlier films reappear, and the attentiveness to
pictorial structure passes fluidly between Coppolas experience with still and moving imagery. The film concludes with
a carnival at duskanother favorite subject of Atget and the
Surrealists. Coppola uses a stately pace for his camera to
counterbalance the frenzy of activity before it, allowing viewers to reconcile the circular movement of the merry-go-round
with the opposing linear paths of two men passing by.
It would be the following spring, after his return to
Buenos Aires, when Coppola would complete his most
ambitious and cinematically complex film, As Naci el
Obelisco (The Birth of the Obelisk). The titular landmark, a

monument to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of the city, was constructed between March 20 and
May 23, 1936, but all of Coppolas shots were taken after
it had reached its full height and before the scaffolding was
removed; in other words, in a very short period of time.
The film interpolates dynamic shots (panning top to bottom,
bottom to top, and, most dramatically, a view skywards from
within the construction elevator as it ascends) with sequences
of carefully constructed stills, demonstrating in just six and a
half minutes a vibrant, confident mix of influences. Certain
views from above echo the vertiginous views Moholy-Nagy
made in Berlin in 1928, or Krull in Marseilles in 1930, while
other perspectives seem to prefigure the taut geometries of
the Concrete art movement that would take hold in Argentina
the following decade. Coppola also relished uncovering the
unpredictable within the recognizable: in a corner of the
obelisks unfinished marble cladding, he found the disorienting angularity of the staircase from Clave de Sol.
Coppolas stills are interspersed with animated vignettes
using a fixed camera angle: the ballet of pedestrians and
street traffic in a sequence of horizonless shots from above,
the playful drama of boys on the construction site, and the
coordinated efforts of scores of artisans going about their
jobs, where the geometries of their working materials become compositional devices through Coppolas lens. These
suites are set against a backdrop of the bustle of urban life
and the newly available vistas of Buenos Aires, seen from
the top of the monument. Although the film is silent (like all of
Coppolas films) and relatively short, it nods to the example
of Walter Ruttmanns Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grostadt
(Berlin: Symphony of a Great City) (fig. 9), that filmmakers
1927 ode to his hometown, as well as Charles Sheeler and
Paul Strands Manhatta. Coppola explicitly addressed the
nature of their achievement, and his own ambition, in his article from Clave de Sol: [W]hen something is organized in
front of the camera by the express will of the filmmaker, the
resulting film is a creation, essentially. . . . [T]he possibility to
create an organized film exists, according to a process imposed on spontaneous reality by collecting filmed fragments
of nature, fragments that compose a new synthesis, which is
human insofar as it responds to the clear and unique conception of the filmmaker.31
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31 Horacio Coppola, On Film and Its
Expression: American Film, Clave de Sol

2 (May 1931): p. 15.
127
Fig 9 Walter Ruttmann.
Stills from Berlin: Die

Sinfonie der Grostadt
(Berlin: Symphony of
a Great City). 1927.
Film: 35mm, blackand-white, silent, 63
minutes. The Museum of
Modern Art, New York
It was spring or perhaps early summer 1935 when Victoria

Ocampo offered Coppola and Stern (by now husband and
wife) a show at Sur, an exhibition that is rightly heralded
today as the foundation of modern photography in Argentina.
Coppolas and Sterns individual visions marked a dramatic
rupture with the past, as Jodi Roberts discusses later in this
book. Although the show was ignored by the dominant
amateur photography magazines, there were favorable (and
extensively illustrated) reviews in two major daily newspapers,
and the critic Jorge Romero Brest used the exhibition as a platform to establish his position on photography as an art form.32
For Coppola and Stern, the Sur exhibition functioned as
a summary of their careers to date, and its positive reception
among the local intelligentsia led to the commission that
would define Coppolas career: the opportunity to photograph Buenos Aires for a major publication celebrating the
400th anniversary of the citys founding, commissioned on
behalf of the municipal government by Mariano de Vedia y
Mitre from the city council and Atilio DellOro Maini, the
secretary for culture. In what could hardly be considered
a coincidence, Victoria Ocampo had been asked in an

interview, What would you do if you were president for
twenty-four hours? Among her four ambitions:
Nothing could better promote us [Argentines] abroad,
where we are absolutely unknown because of our
idleness in this sense, than commissioning Horacio
Coppola, an artist of major talent (whose three great
quality films I just saw), to do a documentary film on
Argentina and an album of photographs of the entire
country, whose beauty could be even greater, in this
genre, than the album published by Cahiers dArt on
the art of Mesopotamia, thanks to our compatriot,
who is better appreciated in France than here.33
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Fig 10 Horacio Coppola. Buenos Aires: Visin Fotogrfica por Horacio Coppola (Buenos Aires: Photographic Vision by Horacio Coppola). Second edition. Buenos Aires:
Municipalidad de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1937, pp. 12627. Collection Sergio Alberto Baur, Buenos Aires
Whatever the impetus behind the commission, Coppola used

the opportunity to construct his own modern vision of the
city, one that would incorporate the celebration of the local
that he had begun to nurture on his walks with Borges, his
appreciation of the citys fabric and structure inspired by Le
Corbusier, his own first attempts photographing the city, and
the myriad influences he had absorbed in Europe.
It is also significant to look to contemporary photographic
projects: Coppola had arrived in Paris the first time shortly
after the publication of Atget: Photographe de Paris (1930),
and no doubt he took careful notice of the French masters
idiosyncratic vision of his native city. Like Atget, Coppola
adopts an expository style that flirts with Surrealism, taking
pleasure in the strange juxtapositions to be found on the city
streets (fig. 10). The realization that avant-garde photography might have as much in common with Atget as with the
more immediately recognizable experimental impulses in
the work of, say, Moholy-Nagy or Man Ray, was one that
came to be associated with American photography of the
1930s, and both threads resonated with Coppola. There
were significant opportunities for cross-pollination, thanks
to an abundance of trans-Atlantic journeys, the proliferation
of photo-illustrated magazines, and the strong American
presence in notable avant-garde exhibitions that were circulating throughout the European continent. It was the younger
generation of American photographersBerenice Abbott
and Walker Evans foremost among themwho identified
Atgets documents as holding significant potential for the
32 For an insightful analysis of this

exhibition and its context, see Vronica
Tell, Latitud-Sur: Coordenadas EstticoPolticas de la Fotografa Moderna en
la Argentina, in Territorios de Dialogo:
Entre los realismos y lo surreal, 1930
1945 (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural
Recoleta and Disputacin de Crdoba,
2006), pp. 195201. For a deeper
consideration of Romero Brests review
128
of this exhibition, see also Tells Entre

el arte y la reproduccin: el lugar de la
fotografa, in Andrea Giunta and Laura
Malosetti Costa, eds., Arte de posguerra:
Jorge Romero Brest y la revista Ver y
Estimar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Paids,
2005), pp. 24362.
33 Qu hara Ud. si fuera presidente
por 24 horas? La Razn, October 23,

1935: p. 5. My sincere thanks to Jodi
Roberts for directing me to this article and
providing the translation.
129
Fig 11 Berenice Abbott. Herald Square, 34th and Broadway, Manhattan. 1936.
Gelatin silver print, 8 10" (20.3 25.4 cm). Photography Collection, Miriam and
Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library,
Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation
development of a modernist idiom in their art. And it is this

ostensibly more traditional vocabulary that Coppola applied
with such force in his photographs of Buenos Aires in 1936.
Many of these have an exacting clarity: historic and modern facades awash with sunlight, ghostly quiet train station interiors, sweeping views along thoroughfares and side streets.
Coppolas decision to use a small-format camera sets his pictures apart from the exquisite detail that Abbott could achieve
with her 8-x-10-inch view camera on a tripod. Although there
are many conceptual and compositional affinities between
them, in Abbotts work there is a solidity, anchored in her
choice of camera, even while capturing the hum of vehicular
and human traffic in midtown Manhattan (fig. 11), whereas
Coppolas work embraces fleeting moments of urban life: the
bustle and blur of activity downtown, in the ports, and at the
racetracks. People are an animating presence, but there are
no individual portraits: the city itself is Coppolas subject, with
the newly constructed obelisk as its triumphant centerpiece.
The culmination of Coppolas commission was Buenos
Aires: Visin fotogrfica por Horacio Coppola (Buenos
Aires: Photographic Vision by Horacio Coppola), published
by the City of Buenos Aires and featuring more than 200
history of the medium. Shot from a strikingly low perspective and reproduced at close to life-size, this weighty form
achieves a monumentality that belies its pedestrian function:
from the very first image, Coppola is drawing attention to
the transformative power of the cameras lens. As with many
of the great urban photobooks of the 1930s, Buenos Aires
includes texts by distinguished authors: Alberto Prebisch,
architect of the obelisk, and Ignacio Anzotegui, who
provides a historical orientation. Prebischs account is more
personal and opens with an explanation that his sentiment
of affection for Buenos Aires had been previously misunderstood as a critique, due to perhaps a type of proper criollo
modesty that pushes us to present our own defects to others,
for the prideful fear that they will point them out first.35 He
concludes by praising the masterful way Coppola has
captured the city:
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Coppola has not only expressed these quotidian
realities that we all know: he has brought to light
others that perhaps we have ignored, because custom blinds us and we end up seeing only the tired
appearances of things. The role of the artist consists
precisely in showing us these things in their essential
reality: this is what Coppola has done in showing
us an antiquated Buenos Aires with Levantine and
tropical aspects that give a very particular character
to a city accused of not having one.36
Fig 12 Horacio Coppola and Leopoldo Marechal. Historia de la Calle Corrientes (History of Calle Corrientes). Buenos Aires: Municipalidad de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1937, pp. 1011.
Collection Sergio Alberto Baur, Buenos Aires
photographs. The first edition had a very traditional cover,

bearing the crest of the city, with a printed paper band
designed by Grete Stern that hinted at the modernist ambition contained within. The second edition, which appeared
the following year, adopted a spiral binding and featured
a photomontage of Coppolas images as its cover, also
designed by Stern (p. 219, fig. 8). In both editions, most
interior spreads feature two photographs, one per page,
with varied and dynamic placement of the images that evoke
34 Coppola did include parenthetical

cardinal references in his titles to orient
his readers. These have been omitted in
this book in light of that specific function
and context.
130
a visual syncopation. Although legend has it that Coppola

traced a spiral over a map of the city and used it to structure
the books sequence, plotting the actual locations of each
plate (when possible) reveals a less systematic, more meandering process.34
Coppolas photograph of a worn brass door-knocker
in the shape of a hand serves as the books frontispiece: a
symbolic point-of-entry familiar to all but also a nod to the
precedent of Atget for readers attentive to the (then-recent)
With the publication of Calle Corrientes and the second edition of Buenos Aires, there seemed to be a shift in Coppolas
creative production. While he continued to photograph, publish books, make films, and write, it is at a slower pace, and
the inventiveness of the previous decade is often absent.37
As the principal photographer for La Plata a su fundador
(1939), a book commissioned by the municipal government
of La Plata on the model of Buenos Aires, he contributed
seventy-three photographs, but with the exception of several
striking nocturnal views and images of sporting events that
would have been at home among his Buenos Aires work (fig.
13), the photographs are largely expository, dutifully capturing notable sites and structures in the comparatively sleepy
provincial capital.38
By 1938, Coppola and Stern had opened a studio on
Calle Cordoba, collaborating on advertising assignments
and signing work jointly while continuing to pursue independent projects as well.39 Their personal and professional
circles expanded beyond Coppolas earlier network of
Fig 13 Guillermo Korn, ed. La Plata a su fundador. La Plata: Edicin de la

Municipalidad, 1939, n.p.
In 1937, Coppola and writer Leopoldo Marechal collaborated to produce Historia de la Calle Corrientes (History
of Calle Corrientes), a book dedicated to the central artery
that bisects Buenos Aires, with, since 1936, the obelisk
at its metaphoric (if not actual) center. It was the street on
which Coppola was born, the street to which he and Stern
moved upon their return to Buenos Aires; a bustling thoroughfare at street level and, seen from above, an emphatic
zip through the urban landscapean ideal subject for
Coppola. Coppola selected the historical illustrations and
contributed all of the contemporary photographs (fig. 12).
The books overall graphic design follows a more traditional model than Buenos Aires, yet it adopts some of the rhythmic page layouts, and several photographs were included
in both books.
35 Alberto Prebisch, La Ciudad en Que
Vivimos, in Coppola, Buenos Aires, p.

12. 36 Ibid. 37 From 1937 until 1943,
Coppola was also head of the Film and
Photography Office at the National
Directorate for Maternity and Infancy.
Patricia Artundo notes that he made
two 16mm films during this time: Vestir
al beb (Dressing the Baby) and Do
de pecho (Hitting Top C ), with scripts
131
by Mercedes P. Torres and marionettes

by Horacio Butler. Horacio Coppola.
Fotografa, p. 363. 38 During his frequent
visits to La Plata, Coppola also spent
hours in the citys museum studying preColumbian earthenware from Peru, which
would eventually result in two books
published in 1943: Huacos, cultura
chim and Huacos, cultura chancay,
with photographs attributed to Stern
and Coppola that resonate strongly with

Coppolas Mesopotamian work. 39 For
instance, seven photographs attributed
to G. y H. Coppola are reproduced
in the January 1937 issue of Anuario
socialista, published by the Socialist Party
in Argentina, including one that had
appeared in Coppolas Buenos Aires.
Fig 14 Horacio Coppola. Esculturas de Antonio Francisco Lisboa: O Aleijadinho
(Sculptures by Antonio Francisco Lisboa [or] The Little Cripple 17381814). Buenos
Aires: Ediciones de la Llanura, 1955, n.p. Collection Edward Grazda, New York
writers, artists, architects, and critics to encompass the influx

of politically and artistically sympathetic European migrs,
including Russian-born architect Wladimiro Acosta, who
designed the couples house on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.
The Italian artist and graphic designer Attilo Rossi worked
closely with Stern and Coppola on the March 1937 issue
of Campo Grafico that featured their individual practices
as well as Coppolas text On Photography.40 This text
represents Coppolas first statement on photography, in
which he underscores the conscious photographers control
over the optical-chemical specificity of the medium. With
the influx of Spanish-speaking exiles from Europe, a proliferation of cultural journals, often short lived, ensued, and
Coppola contributed both his writing and his photographs
to a number of them, including Liberdad Creadora, Correo
Literario, and Latitud. He served as the director of the film
section at Latitud, contextualizing Sergei Eisensteins Que
viva Mexico! (which accompanied a synopsis of the film that
appeared in installments across the first four issues) and introducing five translated texts by the French director Ren Clair.
Coppola continued to make photographs into the
1940s, but in both their number and range they fail to
40 See Rachel Kaplans English
translation of this text in this volume.

41 Hugo Parpagnoli wrote a review of
the book in Sur: Horacio Coppola:
Esculturas de O Aleijadinho, con un
poema de Lorenzo Varela y su version
ingelsa por William Shand, Sur,
NovemberDecember 1956: pp. 108
110. See also Luciano Migliaccio, Luz,
cedro e pedra: esculturas de Aleijadinho
132
fotografadas em Minas Gerais, 1945/

Horacio Coppola (Rio de Janeiro:
Instituto Moreira Salles, 2012). 42 On
the occasion of Film und Foto (Film and
Photo), the seminal 1929 international
photography exhibition in Germany, Roh
wrote: Amateur signifies one who loves
the thing, and dilettante means one who
delights in the thing, observing that the
exhibition, showed next to nothing by
compare with his achievement of the previous decade. His

most ambitious project subsequent to his divorce from Stern
in 1943 revolved around photographing the sculptures of the
(possibly fictive) Brazilian sculptor known as O Aleijadinho
(The Little Cripple) in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais,
work that was exhibited in Buenos Aires in 1953 at the
Amigos del Libro and featured in a handsome volume
in 1955 as Esculturas de Antonio Francisco Lisboa: O
Aleijadinho (Sculptures by Antonio Francisco Lisboa [or] The
Little Cripple) (fig. 14).41 The decade-long gap between the
works creation and their publication is symptomatic of the
reduced pace of Coppolas later career. And yet, Coppola
had rarely worked on more than one project at a time:
one might imagine that the financial stability provided by
his family enabled an approach to photography, film, and
writing that is best captured by the word amateur as defined
by Franz Roh: one who loves the thing.42 The luxury of
approaching art as an amateur may help not only to explain
the exceptional character of Coppolas early work but also
the intermittent nature of his creative fervor later in life.
In July 1955, roughly coinciding with the publication of
O Aleijadinho, Galera Krayd presented the first survey of
Coppolas work, which extended beyond the Buenos Aires
gallery to the department store Gath & Chaves. This would
be the first of many retrospective glances: for the next fifty-five
years, Coppolas primary efforts would revolve around teaching, mentoring, developing his theoretical perspective on photography, and crafting new analyses of his earlier work.43 The
first of these appeared in Jorge Romero Brests arts magazine
Ver y Estimar in October 1955, and it remains illuminating
in the context of our coming to a fuller appreciation today of
Coppolas distinctive contributions to the history of photography: My exhibition responds to an urgent necessity to resume
contact with the world and, fundamentally, to the desire to
present a total visual experience achieved with passion. I
wanted, with photography, to complete a vision of the world.
Photography and vision are identified; in the broad sense of
seeing and in the final concept of knowing.44
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so-called professional photographers,

who so often petrify in conventionality of
manner. Franz Roh, Mechanism and
Expression [1929], in Alan Tractenberg,
ed., Classic Essays on Photography
(New Haven, Conn.: Leetes Island
Books, 1980), p. 155. Luis Priamo notes
Coppolas admiration for Roh in general,
and this statement in particular, in his
essay in Horacio Coppola: Los Viajes,
pp. 1112. 43 Coppola did experiment

with color photography in the 1960s,
the results of which are amply illustrated
in Imagema: Antologa fotogrfia. 44
Horacio Coppola, La Fotografia Para
Horacio Coppola, Ver y Estimar 2, no.
10 (October 1955): p. 13.
HORATIO
Horacio
COPPOLA
Coppola
PHOTOGRAPHS
Plates
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Plate 107
Transparencias (Transparencies). 1928
Plate 108
Prisma de cristal (Glass Prism). 1928
Plate 109
Untitled (ngulo de escalera) (Corner of a Staircase). 1929
Michael Hoppen Gallery, London
134
135
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Plate 111
Rivadavia entre Salguero y Medrano
(Rivadavia between Salguero and Medrano).
1931
7 58 11 516" (19.4 28.7 cm)
Plate 110
Buenos Aires. 1931
Plate 112
Calle California. Vuelta de Rocha. La Boca.
1931
7 58 11 516" (19.4 28.7 cm)
136
137
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Plate 114
Puerto (Port). 1931
4 34 7 116" (12 18 cm)
Estate of Horacio Coppola,
Buenos Aires
Plate 113
Esto es Buenos Aires! (This Is Buenos Aires!) (Jorge Luis Borges). 1931
Plate 115
Puerto Vuelta de Rocha. La Boca.
1931
(12.5 18.5 cm)
Buenos Aires
138
139
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Plate 116
3060 Calle Corrientes. 1931
Plate 117
Untitled (Entrada al 440) (Entrance to 440). c. 1931
140
141
Plate 118
Untitled (Buenos Aires). 1931
6 1116 4 34" (17 12 cm)
Buenos Aires
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Plate 119
Bulnes entre Sarmiento y Cangallo
(Bulnes between Sarmiento
and Cangallo).
1931
6 516 8 14" (16 21 cm)
Buenos Aires
Plate 120
Medianeras con aire-luz (Wall with Airshaft ). 1931
142
143
Plate 121
Corrientes al 3000 (3000 Calle Corrientes). c. 1931
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Plate 122
Still Life with Egg and Twine. 1932
Thomas Walther Collection. Acquired through the generosity of Peter Norton
144
145
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Plate 124
Japanische Blume, Bauhaus, Berlin
( Japanese Flower, Bauhaus, Berlin).
November 1932
6 1116 x 6 1516" (17 x 17.7 cm)
Geraldine J. Murphy Fund
Plate 123
Estudio (Bauhaus Study). October 1932
Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Plate 125
Estudio (Bauhaus Study). October 1932
6 12 7 78" (16.5 20 cm)
146
147
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Plate 126
Cornucopia, Berlin. 1933
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. John Szarkowski Fund
Plate 127
Prague. April 1933
Estate of Horacio Coppola, courtesy Galera Jorge Mara-La Ruche, Buenos Aires
148
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Plate 128
Potsdam. 1932
Plate 129
Grete Stern. 1933
Plate 130
Untitled (Torso). c. 1934
150
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Plate 131
London. 1934
Plate 132
London. 1934
Gelatin silver print, 6 x 7 58" (15.2 x 19.3 cm)
152
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Plate 133
London. 1934
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Richard O. Rieger
Plate 134
Hyde Park, London. 1934
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. John Szarkowski Fund
154
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Plate 135
London. 1934
Gelatin silver print, 5 1116 x 7 78" (14.5 x 20 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Committee on Photography Fund
Plate 136
London. 1934
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Committee on Photography Fund
156
157
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Plate 137
London. 1934
Plate 138
Mataderos, Londres (Slaughterhouses, London). 1934
158
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Plate 139
London. 1934
Plate 140
London Gossips. 1934
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Plate 141
London. 1934
Tate, London. Presented byTateMembers 2013 and
forming part of Eric and Louise Franck London Collection
Plate 142
London. 1934
Tate, London. Presented by Tate Members 2013 and
forming part of Eric and Louise Franck London Collection
162
Plate 143
London. 1934
Plate 144
London. 1934
163
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Plate 145
London. 1934
Plate 146
London. 1934
164
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Plate 147
London. 1934
Plate 148
London. 1934
Plate 149
London. 1934
166
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Plate 150
London. 1934
Plate 151
London. 1934
168
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Plate 152
Riesengebirge. 1934
Plate 153
Ardche. 1935
170
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Plate 154
Stills from Der Traum (The Dream). 1933
Film: 16mm, black-and-white, silent, 2'14"
172
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Plate 155
Stills from Un Muelle del Sena (A Quai on the Seine). 1934
Plate 156
Stills from A Sunday on Hampstead Heath. 1935
174
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Plate 157
Stills from As Naci el Obelisco (The Birth of the Obelisk). 1936
176
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Plate 158
Calle San Martn a las 24 horas (Calle San Martn at Midnight ). 1936
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Plate 159
Hombre lustrandose los zapatos (Man Shining Shoes). 1936

Plate 160
Vidriera (Shop Window). 1938
Plate 161
Calle Florida. 1936
180
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Plate 162
Calle Corrientes. 1936
Plate 163
Calle Suipacha, esquina Diagonal Norte.
Avenida Presidente Roque Senz Pea
(Calle Suipacha at the Corner of Diagonal Norte.
Avenida Presidente Roque Senz Pea). 1936

Plate 164
Florida y Sarmiento (Florida and Sarmiento). 1936
182
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Plate 165
Avenida Corrientes desde el obelisco
(Avenida Corrientes from the Obelisk). 1936
Plate 166
Calle Corrientes desde el obelisco hacia el oeste
(Calle Corrientes from the Obelisk towards the West). 1936
184
185
Plate 167
Calle Corrientes al 3100
(3100 Calle Corrientes). 1936
(15 23 cm)
CollectionLticia and
Stanislas Poniatowski
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Plate 168
Lima y Belgrano
(Lima and Belgrano). 1936
(21 20.6 cm)
CollectionLticia and
Stanislas Poniatowski
Plate 169
Calle San Martn al 500 (500 Calle San Martn). 1936
186
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Plate 170
Viamonte y Reconquista (Viamonte and Reconquista). 1936
Plate 171
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Plate 172
Bartolom Mitre y Montevideo (Bartolom Mitre and Montevideo). 1936
Plate 173
Nocturno (Night Scene). 1936
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Plate 174
Plate 175
Nocturno. Avenida Costanera (Night Scene. Avenida Costanera). 1936
192
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Plate 176
Nocturno. Calle Corrientes al 3000
(Night Scene. 3000 Calle Corrientes). 1936
Plate 177
Avenida Corrientes desde Avenida Alem hacia el oeste
(Avenida Corrientes from Avenida Alem towards the West ). 1936
Plate 178
Avenida de Mayo. 1936
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Plate 179
Calle Bernardo de Irigoyen al 300 (300 Calle Bernardo de Irigoyen). 1936
Plate 180
Avenida Daz Vlez al 4800 (4800 Avenida Daz Vlez). 1936
Gelatin silver print, printed c. 1952, 2312 16 34" (59.7 42.5 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Agnes Rindge Claflin Fund
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Plate 181
El Coloso. Avenida Corrientes. 1937
4 716 7 516" (11.2 18.5 cm)
Plate 183
Avenida Corrientes hacia el oeste
(Avenida Corrientes towards
the West ). 1936
(20.5 13.5 cm)
courtesy Galera Jorge Mara-La Ruche,
Buenos Aires

Plate 182
Avenida Corrientes con obelisco
(Avenida Corrientes with Obelisk). 1936
6 716 5 1116" (16.3 14.5 cm)
Plate 184
Untitled (Buenos Aires). 1936
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Plate 185
Calle Florida. 1936
Plate 186
Florida frente a la entrada de Galeras Pacfico
(Calle Florida at the Entrance of Galeras Pacfico). 1936
Gelatin silver print, 578 612" (14.9 16.5 cm)
200
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Plate 188
Calle Corrientes esquina Reconquista
(Calle Corrientes at the Corner of Reconquista). 1936
Plate 187
Avenida Presidente Roque Senz Pea. Diagonal Norte. 1936
Plate 189
Calle Florida a las 20 horas
(Calle Florida at 8 p.m.). 1936
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Plate 190
Hipdromo Argentino. Palermo
(Argentine Racecourse. Palermo). 1936
Plate 191
Hipdromo de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires Racecourse). 1936
Plate 192
Avenida Presidente Roque Senz Pea y Suipacha
(Avenida Presidente Roque Senz Pea and Suipacha). 1936
204
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Plate 193
Balneario Municipal. 1936
Plate 194
Una esquina, despus de pasar una manifestacin
(A Corner, after a Demonstration). July 24, 1936
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Plate 196
Directorio y Jos Mara Moreno
(Directorio and Jos
Mara Moreno). 1936
6 58 7 1316" (16.8 19.8 cm)
Museo Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofa, Madrid
Plate 195
Estacin Retiro (Retiro Station). 1936
Plate 197
Calle Loreto, esquina Avenida
Luis Mara Campos. Belgrano.
(Calle Loreto, at the Corner of
Avenida Luis Mara Campos.
Belgrano). 1936
7 116 9 1316" (18 25 cm)
Buenos Aires
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Plate 198
Puente Almirante Brown. Riachuelo. 1936
Plate 199
Vista de ciudad con transatlntico (City View with an Ocean Liner). 1936
210
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Common Convictions: Horacio Coppola and

Grete Stern in Buenos Aires, 19351943
Jodi Roberts
Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern arrived in Buenos Aires

in August 1935, eager to make their mark on Argentinas
artistic landscape. They were seeking a reprieve from the
political and social chaos of Europe, where they had been
studying and working together since 1932, and they found
a safe haven in Coppolas home country. Coppolas old
cohort of friends and colleagues, many of them prominent
writers, artists, critics, and historians, welcomed the pair with
open arms. In October 1935, Coppola and Stern mounted
a major exhibition at the headquarters of Sur magazine, the
literary journal founded in 1931 and lauded to this day as
one of Argentinas premier cultural achievements (fig. 1). In
a lengthy review published in Sur itself, renowned art critic
Jorge Romero Brest, a long-time friend of Coppolas, called
the show the first serious manifestation of photographic art
seen in Argentina.1 Romero Brests careful choice of words
tacitly criticized the largely conservative amateur exhibitions
that had characterized Argentinas engagement with photography to that point and set Coppolas and Sterns work
apart as uniquely worthy of the title art, reflective of the
pairs keen creativity and grounded in an uncompromising
exploration of photographys native aesthetic properties and
communicative potential. The critic was not alone in thinking
their photographs filled a lacuna in Argentinas existing art
scene. In opening its halls to an art exhibition (an unusual
step for Sur), the magazines key contributors, including its
famously dynamic founder and director, Victoria Ocampo,
publicly declared their allegiance to Coppola and Sterns
thoroughly modern approach.2
Support from Sur, a journal dedicated to raising
Argentinas international profile, provided Stern and
Coppola with a firm foothold in Buenos Airess thriving,
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1 Jorge Romero Brest, Fotografas
de Horacio Coppola y Grete Stern,
Sur 5, no. 13 (October 1935): p. 91.
2 Vernica Tell, Entre el arte y la
reproduccin: el lugar de la fotografa,
in Andrea Giunta and Laura Malosetti
Costa, eds., Arte de posguerra: Jorge
Romero Brest y la revista Ver y Estimar
(Buenos Aires: Paids, 2005), pp.
24445.
Grete Stern. Invitation to the
exhibition Fotos: H. Coppola y G.
Stern (Photos: H. Coppola and G.
Stern) at the headquarters of Sur,
1935. Collection Jorge Helft and
Marion Eppinger,
Buenos Aires
212
213
turbulent art and literary circles of the 1930s. It also lent

weight to the photographers goal of instating a new, globally viable strain of avant-garde photography and design in
Argentina. For these two artists, steeped in the heady theoretical debates about photographys endemic features, practical applications, and social impact that had raged in Europe
during the interwar years, Buenos Airess photography scene
of 1935 no doubt appeared both woefully out of date and
full of possibilities. Enthusiastic clubs of amateur photographers and commercial photography studios specializing in
portraits and postcards had existed in Argentinas capital
since the late nineteenth century, and their overall conservative approach to the medium in both style and subject
matter continued to hold sway decades later. From the time
Stern and Coppola arrived until their divorce in 1943, they
sought to revolutionize conceptions of photographys artistic
value in Argentina. Drawing upon key tenets of their work in
Berlin, London, and other European cities, they developed
a practice that collapsed hierarchical distinctions between
high art photography and commercial work, and stressed
the mediums potential as a potent vehicle of ideological
meaning. Their arrival in Argentina foretold both a shift in
the morphological features associated with modern photography there and a reconfiguration of notions about how
serious photographers should purpose and distribute their
work. Perhaps not surprisingly, Coppola and Stern found
few sympathizers within Argentinas existing photography
circles. The vanguard artists and writers they met through Sur
and other key Argentine cultural outlets, however, proved to
be ready and supportive collaborators.
Coppola, born and raised in Argentina, was of course a
known entity in Buenos Aires, having emerged as a photographer there slowly but with a considerable public audience,
Fig 1 Cover of Sur 1, no. 1 (1931)
Fig 2 Advertisement
featuring ringl + pits

Komol (pl. 29) as the
image appeared in La
Nacin, March 24,
1935: p. 2. Fundacin
Espigas, Buenos Aires
starting with the two photographs he published in Jorge Luis

Borgess Evaristo Carriego in 1930 and the thirteen images
of Buenos Aires he published in Surs fourth and fifth issues.3
Coppolas work as a fledgling art and film critic in the late
1920s and early 1930s also solidified his status as a regular
within Argentinas cultural avant-garde. But even the work of
German-born Stern had some exposure in Argentina before
October 1935, although probably without her knowing it. In
March of that year, several months before she and Coppola
arrived from London, the award-winning advertisement for
Komol hair dye that she created with Ellen Rosenberg as part
of their ringl + pit advertising studio appeared in the weekend supplement of La Nacin newspaper (fig. 2; pl. 29).
Repurposed to promote a local brand of dye sold at Gath &
Chaves, a high-end Argentine department store, the image
had been altered to obscure the Komol label but maintained
its distinctive, witty appeal.4
Yet none of Coppolas and Sterns earlier appearances
in Argentina anticipated the manifesto-like decree of their
3 Jorge Luis Borges, Evaristo Carriego
(Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer, 1930);

Horacio Coppola, Siete Temas de
Buenos Aires, Sur 4 (Spring 1931):
n.p., insert; and untitled photography by
Coppola in Sur 5 (Summer 1932): n.p.,
insert. 4 La Nacin, March 24, 1935,
weekend supplement: p. 2. 5 Exposicin
de fotografas de Horacio Coppola y
Grete Stern, que se inaugurar maana
214
en el local de Sur, Viamonte 548, La

Prensa, October 6, 1935; and Una
exposicin de estudios fotogrficos, La
Nacin, October 6, 1935. 6 Christian
Zervos, Lart de la Msopotamie: de la
fin du quatrime millnaire au XVe sicle
avant notre re: Elam, Sumer, Akkad
(Paris: Cahiers dArt, 1935). 7 Romero
Brest, Fotografas de Horacio Coppola y
Grete Stern, pp. 91102. 8 See Rachel
1935 exhibition. No catalogue was produced for the show,

but newspaper announcements in La Prensa and La Nacin
(fig. 3), together with Romero Brests review, indicate that it
showcased the diversity of work they had produced while
in Europe.5 Plainly favoring Argentinas native son, the
newspapers reproduced six works by Coppola. With the
exception of a Buenos Aires street scene from 1931, all
were made during his 193235 trip overseas: two studies
of Mesopotamian sculpture produced for the Cahiers dArt
book Lart de la Msopotamie, two French landscapes, and
a photograph of a doll, which Coppola had created at the
Bauhaus, where he and Stern had studied together during
fall 1932 and spring 1933.6 Both newspapers also made
a nod to Sterns successes with ringl + pit through reproductions of her portraits of female sitters. The photographs in
La Prensa and La Nacin roughly accord with the scope of
images referenced in Romero Brests articleportraits, still
lifes, landscapes, cityscapesbut the critic also highlighted Sterns foto-reclame, or advertisements, a type of work
rarely, if ever, considered suitable for an art exhibition in
Buenos Aires at the time.7 The vision of the show offered by
these sources may be piecemeal, but it nevertheless captures
Stern and Coppolas audacious insistence on presenting
photographs attuned to progressive international trends in
photography as well as their full embrace of the mediums
commercial use.
The single-page brochure Coppola and Stern produced
for the exhibition likewise declared, both visually and
textually, their intention to assume a place at the helm of
Argentinas photography and design worlds. Sterns dynamic, stacked composition on the cover announced the shows
location, opening date, and contents (p. 212). In a deft
homage to the exhibitions host and sponsor, she incorporated the downward-facing arrow of Surs logo, turned here
slightly clockwise to dramatize the layouts quick diagonal
sweep across the page. In an uncompromising prescription
for photographys future development, the short statement
on the back of the flyer, drawn directly from the work of
German photographer Walter Peterhans, with whom Stern
and Coppola had studied, helps clarify their theoretical
model and technical demands.8 The text splits the creation
of a photograph into two parts: first, the subjective process
of selecting a subject, framing it, and assessing lighting and
other environmental conditions; and second, the manual and

chemical process of releasing the shutter and developing
the film. It expressly prohibits the retouching of negatives or
prints, which the authors argued [deprives] the photographic technique of its specific properties.9 Like many vanguard
photographers of their generation in Europe and North
America, Coppola and Stern pressed for an investigation of
photographys native aesthetic qualities through the exploration of innovative framing, focus, lighting, tonal contrasts,
and other techniques born specifically of the camera and
the photographic process. A truly adept photographer, they
insisted, should be so familiar with the tools of his or her
trade and so attuned to details of surface texture, lighting,
and other ambient factors as to render darkroom corrections unnecessary. The exhibition may well have included
examples of photomontage, which Stern often employed in
her early design and advertising work. But in their public
announcement, Stern and Coppola emphasized the artistic
validity of photographs produced as resolute reflections of
their subjects, unaltered but certainly reflecting their authors
own subjective vision.
Coppola and Stern reserved their most radical claim for
the close of the brochure. With rhetorical flourish, they ask,
Is photography an art?, only to respond: In fact, photography has refrained from addressing this issue: it has created
its own place in todays life; it has a social function.10 The
mediums principle value, they argue, lay in its specific
ability to detail and highlight the reality of [the] people and
things it captures.11 Summarily sweeping aside decades-old
debates over whether or not the mediums mechanical nature
impugned its artistic legitimacyquestions that still roiled
Argentinas amateur photography circlesthe statement unapologetically celebrates photographys documentary acuity.
Whats more, in their emphasis on photographys social
function, Stern and Coppola hint at its capacity to shape
public opinion, in addition to its many far-reaching practical
applications. A photographers intelligence, creativity, and
worldview, as the works in the exhibition surely demonstrated, would shine through whether his or her images found an
audience through advertising, photobooks, and periodicals,
or inclusion in high-minded art exhibitions.
The Sur exhibition and brochure met with stunned
silence from Argentinas amateur photographers and
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Kaplans translation of this text in this

volume. Coppola later credited Peterhans
as the texts principal author, saying he
only revised it for the exhibition at Sur
with Stern. See Coppolas interview with
Adrin Gorelik, Horacio Coppola: testimonios, in Horacio Coppola. Fotografa
(Madrid: Fundacin Telefnica, 2008),
pp. 37677.
9 Coppola and Stern, Artists Statement

(1935), in this volume. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid.
215
Fig 3 Announcements for Coppola and Sterns exhibition at the
headquarters of Sur magazine in, top, La Nacin, October 6,

1935: p. 2 of weekend supplement, and, bottom, La Prensa,
October 6, 1935: section four. Fundacin Espigas, Buenos Aires
Fig 4 El correo fotogrfico sudamericano (The South American Photographic Post),

October 15, 1935: cover. La Biblioteca Nacional de la Repblica Argentina
professional studios. The countrys leading photography journal, El correo fotogfico sudamericano (The South American
Photographic Post), ignored it completely (fig. 4). The oversight was, as Luis Priamo has pointed out, more likely a quiet
protest than an accident.12 Coppola and Sterns rhetorical
insistence on straightforward, unmanipulated photographic
technique and their appeal for a socially integrated brand
of modern photography was an uneasy fit with the type of
photographs that had become the mainstay of El correo
fotogrfico and other local photo-centered magazines,
including Foto Revista and Foto Magazine.13 These journals
concentrated on conveying technical knowledge and arguing for photographys rightful place alongside traditional
fine-art media like painting and drawing. Following in the
footsteps of early-twentieth-century Pictorialists, photography
critics in Argentina earnestly demonstrated and championed
the mediums material flexibility through long lists of the
systemsincluding bromoil, gum bichromate, or carbon
12 Luis Priamo, Grete Stern: obra fotogrfica en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Fondo
Nacional de las Artes, 1996), p. 16.
13 For more on the amateur photography
clubs in Argentina and their publications
in the 1920s and 1930s, see Sara Facio,
La fotografa en la Argentina desde
1840 a nuestros das (Buenos Aires: La
Azotea, 1995), pp. 3743. 14 Notas
de la Comisin Organizadora del Primer
216
Saln Anual de Arte Fotogrfico, Foto

Magazine 4, no. 41 (1930): p. 6.
15 Extracto de los artculos publicados
por la prensa de Buenos Aires, ibid.,
pp. 1620.
prints; prints on metal; photogravures; and oil printsthat

would allow photographers to manually mold their images to
imitate the look of turn-of-the-century painting, hazy atmospheric effects and all. Lessons in the type of decorous subject matter worthy of artistic photography were also plentiful.
Judging from the photographs reproduced in these journals,
this customarily meant tried-and-true art-historical subjects:
staged portraits, allegorical nudes, quaint genre scenes, and
picturesque landscapes.
The tireless efforts by the editors of these magazines to
convince readers and a broader public of photographys
artistic legitimacy were not in vain. By May 1930, the Primer
Saln Internacional de Arte Fotogrfico (First International
Salon of Photographic Art), convened in the exhibition
spaces of the Amigos del Arte, one of the capitals key cultural institutions and a favorite haunt of Coppolas, provided
proof of the mediums incursion into the citys larger cultural
consciousness (fig. 5). Assembling more than three hundred
works by photographers residing in seventeen foreign countries, it attracted more than ten thousand visitors in the course
of its two-week run.14 Positive reviews appeared in no less
than five national newspapers.15 In the salons catalogue,
the architect Jorge Servetti Reeves triumphantly proclaimed
that the show confirmed photography had been definitively
incorporated into the dominion of Art, noting further that

Argentine audiences could now fully appreciate the expressive possibilities offered up by photographys multiplicity of
interpretive resources.16
The images selected for the 1930 Salon clearly demonstrated Pictorialisms continued hold on local tastes. But
Servetti Reeves also offered a gentle nudge toward the mediums emancipation from paintings overbearing influence.
As he wrote, The real challenge with this beautiful art is not
to fall, as happens all too often, into the imitation of techniques that are completely apart from photography, which
should never lose its characteristic plasticity for the sake of
an eagerness to look like works drawn by pencil or brush.17
Servetti Reevess suggestion was lost on most amateur photographers and connoisseurs in Argentina, but between the
1930 Salon and Stern and Coppolas show in 1935, a few
key photographers and publications in Buenos Aires indeed
began to tentatively probe more recent photographic trends.
In part, this subtle shift sprang from the injection of new
blood into Argentine photography circles. The Russian photographer Anatole Saderman, who lived in Berlin in the early
1920s before settling in Buenos Aires in 1930, became an
El correo fotogfico favorite within a few years of his arrival.
Sadermans best-known works of the 1930s (fig. 6)carefully
lit, sharply detailed botanical studies produced for the
book Maravillas de nuestras plantas indgenas y algunas
exticas (Wonders of Our Indigenous Plants and a Few
Exotic Species)have drawn frequent comparisons to Karl
Blossfeldts photographs in Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in
Nature) of 1929.18 The German-born Annemarie Heinrich,
who set up her first photography studio in Buenos Aires in
1930, likewise quickly became a darling of Buenos Aires
based photo clubs. Drawn to the world of entertainment and
theater, Heinrich carved out a niche for herself as a specialist
in producing dramatically lit, glamor-infused portraits of dancers, musicians, and Argentine film stars (fig. 7). Press outlets
other than the amateur photography club magazines also fed a
growing popular interest in the medium in the mid-1930s. The
weekend supplements of La Nacin and La Prensa, lushly illustrated with high-quality photogravure reproductions, provided
visually enticing photojournalistic coverage of current events,
previews of images on display in photography exhibitions, and
even an occasional note on novel photographic techniques.19
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Fig 5 Exhibition view of the Primer Saln Internacional de Arte Fotogrfico (First
International Salon of Photographic Art), Amigos del Arte, Buenos Aires, May 1930,
as reproduced in Foto Magazine 4, no. 41 (1930): p. 17. La Biblioteca Nacional de
la Repblica Argentina
16 Jorge Servetti Reeves, Algunos comentarios sobre el Primer Saln Internacional

de Arte Fotogrfico, ibid., p. 9. 17 Ibid.,
p. 10. 18 Ilse von Rentzell and ngel M.
Gimnez, Maravillas de nuestras plantas
indgenas y algunas exticas (Buenos
Aires: I. von Rentzell y Ca., 1935). 19
Facio, La fotografa en la Argentina, p. 37.
217
None of these departures from the dominant Pictorialist

models, however, matched Coppola and Sterns radical
reformulation of photographys aesthetic possibilities and
its place in both the art world and a broader social and
political sphere. While Sadermans and Heinrichs photographs eschewed efforts to look like paintings or drawings,
they nonetheless espoused strictly studio-based practices that
lacked the mandate for social interaction that made Sterns
and Coppolas work so compelling. And while publications
like La Prensa and La Nacin helped foment popular taste
for high-quality photographic coverage of current events,
they did little to advance an understanding of the mediums
place within a larger art world or interact with the theoretical underpinnings of particular photographic trends. Only
Coppola and Sterns model provoked a cogent discussion
of joining the concepts of photography as an art and as
a social tool. The work of a good photographer, according to Coppola and Stern, should be at once intellectually
rigorous, engaged with the public at large via a range of
commercial and non-commercial platforms, and actively in
touch with the messy social and political realities of contemporary experience.
Stern and Coppola were little concerned about their exhibitions snub from Argentine photographers. They concentrated
instead on fortifying their ties to the artists and writers they
thought most attuned with their own avant-garde agenda.
Few of Stern and Coppolas partnerships in Argentina were
Fig 6 Anatole Saderman. Manihot Grahamii/Hardy Tapioca, Fruits and Leaves. 1934.
Gelatin silver print, 11 14 8 716" (28.6 21.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New
York. Latin American and Caribbean Fund through gift of Mara Luisa Ferr Rangel
Fig 7 Annemarie Heinrich. Caprices, Anita Grimm. 1936. Gelatin silver print, 8 18
11" (20.6 28.6 cm). Nailya Alexander Gallery, New York
as generative as their collaboration with Italian graphic

designer and critic Attilio Rossi, a founding editor of the
Milanese design journal Campo Grafico, which was a stalwart champion of modernist art, architecture, and, above all,
typography and graphic design.20 A vocal critic of Benito
Mussolinis Fascist Party, Rossi left his increasingly inhospitable Italian home for Argentina in 1935, where Sur gladly
took him on as its chief art critic.21 Rossis purview within Sur
was broad: he analyzed painting and sculpture exhibitions,
architectural projects, and films; encouraged local artists
to embrace the lessons of European modernist masters like
Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky; and militantly advocated for meaty art criticism that moved beyond long lists of
exhibitions on view and lyrical descriptions of works of art.
Rossi, Coppola, and Stern were kindred spirits in their
shared experience of, and investment in, modernist efforts
to breathe new life into artistic production as a whole
from fine-arts media to objects produced for practical and
commercial use. The months Stern and Coppola spent at the
20 For more on Campo Grafico, see

Tilde Vitta Zelman, ed., Campo Grafico,
19331939: rivista di estetica e di
tecnica grfica (Milan: Electa, 1983).
21 Francesco Flora, Attilio Rossi (Milan:
Edizione del Milione, 1962), pp. 1617.
22 Attilio Rossi, Sfogliando un libro,
Campo Grafico 4, no. 6 (June 1936): p.
6. 23 Ibid. 24 Horacio Coppola, Buenos
Aires: Visin fotogrfica por Horacio
218
Bauhaus, the institution famous for positioning craftwork and

commercial endeavors on equal footing with traditionally
hallowed fine-arts media, instilled in the pair a firm conviction in the cultural value of the applied arts, something Stern
had been exposed to earlier during her time studying at
the technical high school in Stuttgart. While in Italy, Rossi,
too, revered the Bauhaus and Dutch de Stijl for their call for
aesthetic renewal and technical renovation across art forms
high and lowfrom architecture to home goods, from painting and sculpture to graphic design. Questions of how to
implement this modernist directive for a revitalization of the
applied and decorative arts in Argentina both plagued and
inspired the trios work together in Buenos Aires.
Rossi continued to work on Campo Grafico from Buenos
Aires, and his advocacy of Coppolas and Sterns work in
the magazine far outdid that of any Argentine press outlet,
excepting, perhaps, Sur. Rossi no doubt passed copies of
the journal to friends and colleagues in the city, but the
bulk of Campo Graficos readership resided abroad, thus
keeping an international audience abreast of Coppolas and
Sterns professional feats. Rossis full-page illustrated review
of Coppolas 1936 Buenos Aires appeared in Campo
Graficos June issue, heaping praise on the photographers
complete vision of the city in all its monumental, commercial, industrial, and folkloric aspects.22 Rossis only
complaint centered on the books classic format, by which
he surely meant its traditional, cloth-bound cover, an imposition, he surmised, from the albums municipal sponsors. In
exchange for the books retrograde cover and traditional
binding, Rossi argued, Coppolas cutting-edge vision of
the city would be better served by the format of a luxury
magazine, more agile, more free, with cardboard covers
bound on a metal spiral, with an interesting photomontage
on its front.23 Thus, Coppola teamed up with Rossi and
Stern, whose expertise in avant-garde graphic design was
unmatched in Argentina, for the 1937 reissue of the book,
and the trio followed Rossis prescription precisely: clad in
cardboard with a spiral binding, the revised volume features
a cover composed almost exclusively from photographic
imagery, even in its bold, shadowed lettering (fig. 8).24 Stern
likely composed the cover, overlaying an aerial view by
Coppola of Buenos Airess city center, printed in orange,
with black-and-white details of photographs from inside the
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Coppola (Buenos Aires: Municipalidad

de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1937).
219
Fig 8 Coppola, Stern, and

Attilio Rossis cover design
for the 1937 edition of
Coppolas Buenos Aires
(Buenos Aires: Municipalidad
de la ciudad de Buenos
Aires). Collection Raul Naon,
Buenos Aires
volume, a photomontage that offers at once an overarching

vision of the citys changing urban fabric and an intimate
view of its architectural diversity. The overhead view, carefully selected to highlight recent development in the Argentine
capital, reveals a partially constructed Plaza de la Repblica
in its upper register; the shadow of the sites newly minted
obelisk is clearly visible, but the monumental Avenida 9 de
Julio, which will run north and south of it, is conspicuously
incomplete. By contrast, the superimposed shots of architectural detailstaken from inventive angles that evoke the
photographers search for unexpected perspectivesconnote
Coppolas subjective reaction to his urban surroundings,
rescuing his work from the stodgy formality and impersonal
air that emanated from the cover of the books first edition.
With its profusion of documentary detail, the 1937 Buenos
Aires is indelibly linked to its title subject, but it is also of a
piece with the bold stylings of photographically illustrated
mass media produced in cultural capitals like Berlin, Paris,
London, and New York. Just as Buenos Aires endured a major remodeling of its civic center in the mid-1930s, the work
suggests, Rossi, Coppola, and Stern would radically remake
its public presentation.
In Campo Graficos March 1937 issue, the trio clarified
the terms of their aesthetic agenda for modernist design. In
part the issue, which was dedicated entirely to Stern and
Coppola, was a belated gesture of appreciation for the
pairs 1935 exhibition, with portraits and biographies of
both photographers, reproductions of works comparable to
those shown at Surs headquarters, and a reprint of their brochure text, the key points of which Coppola reiterated and
elaborated upon in an essay titled Della fotografia (On
Photography).25 Even beyond the successes of individual
photographs or the theoretical tenets of Coppola and Sterns
thinking, Campo Grafico argued, the photographers were
worthy of distinction for their ability to craft modern images
suited to the particular needs of a given book, magazine,
poster, or advertisement. Building on ideas championed by
design pioneers of the previous decade, Rossi advances as
much in his essay Fotografia e Tipografia (Photography
and Typography), wherein he describes a publications
visual and textual features as communicatively interdependent: The image abbreviates and clarifies the discourse, he
argues, borrowing directly from Lszl Moholy-Nagy, while
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Fig 9 Sterns cover design for
Campo Grafico 5, no. 3 (March
1937) (see also pl. 76). Museum
Folkwang, Essen, Germany
25 Horacio Coppola, Della fotografia,

Campo Grafico 5, no. 3 (March 1937):
pp. 811. See also Rachel Kaplans
translation of this text in this volume. 26
Attilio Rossi, Fotografia e Tipografia,
Campo Grafico 5, no. 3 (March 1937):
p.12. Rossis statement chimes with
Lszl Moholy-Nagys famous essay
Typophoto (1925), in Moholy-Nagy,
Painting, Photography, Film, with a note
220
221
by Hans M. Wingler and a postscript by

Otto Stelzer, translated by Janet Seligman
(Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press,
1987), pp. 3840. 27 Editors note to
Horacio Coppola, On Photography,
Rachel Kaplan, trans., in this volume.
28 II Saln de Artistas Decoradores
(Buenos Aires: Direccin Nacional de
Bellas Artes, 1937), p. 5. Rossi reviewed
the exhibition twice: II Saln de Artistas
the word increases the meaning of the image.26 To create

a design that is both textually and visually compelling, a
photographer must heed the logical imposition of a given
projects functional aspects, a skill that Stern and Coppola
had already fine-tuned.
Coppola, Stern, and Rossi happily deflated what they
called the controversial windbaggery at the core of many
debates in Argentina and elsewhere about photographys
artistic legitimacy by seeking projects aimed at a broad
public audience rather than a select circle of art-world elites,
insisting that commercial photography and design work, as
much as any other artistic endeavor, involves deep deliberation and dexterous skill.27 Sterns cover design gives form
to their ideas, referring to a designers intellectual search for
creative, visually expressive solutions that strike a balance
between text and image, between visual stimulation and cohesive composition (fig. 9). She candidly discloses the tools
of her trade: lettered printing blocks of varied sizes and rails
to hold them rest horizontally and perpendicularly against
a flat surface covered in newsprint and a photograph of an
urban horizon line. Sterns allusion to the constructed nature
of the image and text layout draws attention to the agency
of photographers and designers as deeply engaged thinkers
and makers.
In projects planned and executed in Argentina,
Coppola, Stern, and Rossi adopted an aggressively didactic tone in their efforts to prime the appreciation of local
audiences for graphic design, inventive layouts, commercial
photography, and other types of artwork traditionally excluded from the fine-arts canon. In June/July 1937, the three
joined forces with a committee of painters and sculptors
to organize the II Saln Nacional de Artistas Decoradores
(Second National Salon of Decorator Artists) in La Plata, the
capital of the province of Buenos Aires. According to Rossi,
the exhibition was the first step in remedying what the organizing committee decried as Argentinas lack of normative
aesthetic tradition in matters of decorative and design work,
not to mention the lack of technical ability observed in our
artisans and workers.28 The committee called for governmentfunded schools dedicated to the decorative arts and industrial design, and the works on view, including theater sets,
furniture, and, above all, posters and book illustrations,
served as models of the visual power and material quality
Decoradores, Sur 7 (July 1937):

pp. 9295; and Esposizione di Arte
Decorativa in Buenos Aires, Campo
Grafico 5, no. 12 (December 1937): pp.
1218.
of modern design. Rossi, Coppola, and Stern were not shy to

display their own works as well: the catalogue lists a poster
for a commercial aviation company and two photomontage
book illustrations by Rossi; two photographic studies by
Coppola; and a large-scale poster, shop-window sign, and
two advertisements by Stern.29
The crucial goal of the salon, though, was to move beyond
the finite study of particular objects in order to better grasp
the function of the decorative and applied arts within a broader environment. A history lesson within the exhibition itself
prodded visitors to ruminate on these art forms rich and varied
development. Four temporary, freestanding walls printed with

texts and photographic reproductions of objects, artworks,
and buildings guided visitors on a historical journey that
reached back to the rudimentary tools of prehistoric man and
progressed forward to introduce the tenets of twentieth-century
campaigns for all-encompassing aesthetic environmentsideas
with which Stern, Coppola, and Rossi were well familiar. The
exhibitions call for a fruitful collaboration across all media
from traditional painting and sculpture to newer inventions like
photography, film, and radiowas unequivocal: The decorative arts should put themselves in close contact with the fine
arts in order that our era can give its complete expression in
architecture, in decoration, in a chair, in a piece of jewelry, in
a spoon, as was the case in the classical periods.30
Coppola and Stern put their calls for innovation in the
applied arts and photography in Argentina to the test that
same year when they opened an independent advertising
studio in downtown Buenos Aires. Expecting a rush of
business, they enlisted a lawyer friend as an agent and the
assistance of Luis Seoane, a painter and graphic designer
who had moved to Buenos Aires in 1936 after the outbreak
of the Spanish Civil War.31 The breadth of materials and
services offered by the studio reveals the teams concerted
attempt to attract a wide-ranging clientele. Photography,
as the flyer they developed to solicit potential clients clearly
demonstrates, was imagined as the heart of the endeavor.
The cover image is constructed around playful contrasts (fig.
10): a photographic print of a womans hand, dressed at
the wrist in a band of white lace, holds an illustration of a
fountain pen; the mechanical, typewriter-like font that runs
along the compositions upper edge deviates stylistically from
the whimsical cartoons of a telephone and a letter-bearing
bird that add visual flavor to contact information. On the reverse, an expansive list of services renderedphotographs,
portraits, montages, commercial photographs, documentary
photographs, documentary films, drawings, illustrations,
typographic compositions, layout design, designs for customized packaging, logos, posters, advertisements, photographic advertisementsis repeated across the entire length
of the brochure. The flyer captures the artists mastery of art
forms ranging from the mechanical to the handcrafted, the
cutting-edge to the traditional, but all aimed at producing images and objects for a modern, mass-media-driven economy.
Unfortunately, local businesses in Buenos Aires were not yet
ready to accept Stern and Coppolas innovations, and the
studio closed a year after its debut.32
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Fig 10 Stern and Coppolas cover design for a brochure for their advertising studio at 363 Calle Crdoba, Buenos Aires. Estate of Horacio Coppola, Buenos Aires
The choice Rossi and Seoane made to move to Argentina

as an escape from political hostilities in their home countries
was one made by many members of Coppola and Sterns
most intimate social and professional network. Clment
Moreau, a strident communist painter and illustrator from
29 II Saln de Artistas Decoradores, pp.

13, 17.
30 Ibid., p. 9. 31 Priamo, Grete Stern,

p. 20. 32 Ibid., p. 21. 33 Ibid., p. 23.
34 For more on debates and develop-
ments in Argentine national politics in the

1930s, see Luis Alberto Romero, The
Conservative Restoration, 19301943,
in A History of Argentina in the Twentieth
Century, James P. Brennan, trans.
(University Park: The Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2014), pp. 5990;
222
223
and Daro Macor, Partidos, coaliciones

y sistema de poder, in Alejandro
Cattaruzza, ed., Nueva Historia
Argentina, vol. 7, Crisis econmica,
avance del estado e incertidumbre poltica (19301943) (Buenos Aires: Editorial
Sudamericana, 2001), pp. 4996.
35 Romero, The Conservative
Restoration, pp. 61, 7475.
Germany who landed in Buenos Aires in 1936, and Arturo

Cuadrado, a Galician writer and publisher who settled there
in 1939, likewise found in Stern and Coppola sympathetic
interlocutors.33 The photographers efforts to transplant the
promising careers they had built for themselves abroad to
South American soil mirrored the hopes of a generation of
pioneering cultural entrepreneurs who, with Europe mired in
violence and political turmoil, decided to start anew in the
Americas. Between 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor of Germany, and the end of World War II in Europe in
1945, Buenos Aires received thousands of immigrants fleeing the fallout of fascist revolutions in Germany, Italy, and,
accounting for the greatest influx, Spain. The effect of this
surge of foreign-born workers and thinkers on Argentinas
political dynamics and cultural priorities was transformative.
Even before Coppola left for Germany in 1932,
Argentina itself had begun to show signs of serious political
unrest. In September 1930, a military coup unseated democratically elected President Hiplito Yrigoyen, ushering in
a period of political intrigue that has earned the 1930s in
Argentina the unenviable nickname of la dcada infame
(the infamous decade). Under the successive presidencies
of Jos Flix Uriburu (193032), Agustn Justo (193238),
Roberto Mara Ortiz (193842), and Ramn Castillo
(194243), Argentinas national government abused
constitutional rule through widespread electoral fraud and
the active repression of oppositional voices, including those
artists and writers who were deemed especially offensive.34
An ever-shifting coalition of left-leaning parties, including
Socialists, Communists, and Progressive Democrats, held
protests on stages ranging from the floor of the Argentine
senate to art exhibitions convened in municipal government
offices. Many were quick to detect parallels between the
increasingly sinister policies of contemporaneous European
regimes and the Argentine national governments targeted
acts of political repression, social and cultural conservatism, and advocacy of aristocratic, military-supported
governance. Argentine conservative factions essentially
controlled the presidency, and their enemies, including
communists, new immigrants to Argentina, and Jews,
dovetailed all too well with those of Hitler, Mussolini, and
Franco.35 The fact that Argentine officials refused to condemn Franco and held firm to a position of neutrality during
World War II well into the 1940s, when many South

American countries had pronounced themselves backers of
the Allies, was irrefutable proof, according to many progressive thinkers in Argentina, of the national governments
tacit support of totalitarianism.36
Divisions along ideological lines in Argentinas cultural
sphere began to solidify in the mid-1930s, as artists, writers,
and critics in Buenos Aires felt compelled to declare allegiances in battles unfurling both on the Argentine political
stage and internationally. Hints of Sterns and Coppolas
entanglement in these debates appeared as early as their
1935 exhibition at Sur. The lengthy response to the exhibition
by Romero Brest, who was not a regular contributor to the
literary journal, cast their work in an explicitly political light
and described their photographs as replete with revolutionary
potential. Drawing on contemporary Marxist interpretations
of politically effective artwork, the critic homed in on what he
called the verism of Coppolas and Sterns photographs to
argue that their insistently frank style and indelible link to realworld objects proved the artists sympathy for an imperiled
larger human collectivity.37 The photographers, according
to Romero Brest, comprehended what the critic believed to be
the most pressing imperative of the day for an artist: liberating the human spirit from old idealist prejudices so that the
truth of everyday existencesocial and political truthcan
appear.38 In a nation overrun by what Romero Brest surely
took to be corrupt politicians and treacherous social policies,
Coppolas and Sterns work, he argued, unlocked photographys potential to effectively undermine the inflated rhetoric of
contemporary political discourse through truthful renderings
of people, objects, and everyday experience. His politicized
reading of the pairs work betrayed a broader set of concerns
about the relationship among art, aesthetics, and political
powercritical questions no doubt provoked by instability at
home and abroad and shared by many prominent institutions
and individuals in Argentinas artistic community.
Stern and Coppola refrained from commenting directly
on the feverish political debates that riled Argentina in the
years they worked there together as partners. They were
neither card-carrying members of a particular political party
nor vocal agitators for any specific cause. Nonetheless,
their involvement in projects like the 1937 issue of Anuario
socialista, the yearly review published by La Vanguardia, the
36 Marcela Gen, Impresos bajo

fuego. Caricaturas e ilustraciones
en la prensa antifacista portea
(194041), Equipe Interdisciplinaire
de Recherche sur lImage Satirique,
accessed June 2, 2014: http://www.
eiris.eu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=260:dessins-argentins-en-1940-article-de-marcela-gene&catid=69&Itemid=126. 37 Romero Brest,
224
Socialist press also responsible for a newspaper of the same

name, sheds light on their political sympathies.39 The role of
cultural institutions in arousing support for revolutionary causes
figured prominently in the volume, edited by Guillermo Korn,
a La Platabased Socialist activist. Korn included notes on
theater, popular arts in Argentina, and international art
movements that the publication touted as revolutionary in
both content and form, such as Mexican Muralism and Soviet
Socialist Realism. Coppola and Stern contributed seven
jointly signed photographs: two illustrate an article on crafts
from Argentinas depressed northern regions, but the others
stand as independent artworks, unaccompanied by explanatory comment. Rendered in a straight, documentary style,
the photographs offer sensitive portraits of Buenos Airess
lower- and working-class environs and their inhabitants
street vendors, the homeless, impoverished families, and the
dilapidated multifamily homes used by many new migrants to
the city (fig. 11). As overt declarations of photographys pertinence to political and economic struggle, the pictures built
on Romero Brests claim that, in the hands of able photographers like Stern and Coppola, photographys documentary
precision could poignantly reveal the suffering provoked by
corrupt political schemes and usurious economic systems.
The couples contributions to Anuario socialista marked
more than a passing flirtation with leftist groups in Argentina.
Coppola sustained a lasting partnership with Korn, a key
backer of and contributor to a 1939 book on La Plata, to
which Coppola contributed a rich series of photographs.40
The photographer was also, along with Romero Brest, an
active participant in the Universidad Popular Alejandro Korn,
a Socialist-backed think-tank named after Guillermos father,
a leftist philosopher and university reformer.41 Stern did not
shy away from association with politically engaged groups
either. In the early 1940s she completed a photographic
series on the Instituto Pestalozzi, a progressive German
school in Buenos Aires founded in 1934 with the express
aim of defending a vision of German culture as open, democratic, and deeply intellectual, as a counterweight to what
the school denounced as National Socialisms backward
racial and social ideals. Clment Moreau, who throughout
the late 1930s published withering caricatures of Hitler and
the Nazis, taught drawing classes there and likely introduced
Stern to the school.42
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Fotografas de Horacio Coppola y Grete

Stern, p. 100. 38 Ibid. 39 Guillermo
Korn, ed., Anuario socialista (Buenos
Aires: La Vanguardia, 1937). 40 La Plata
a su fundador (La Plata: Edicin de la
Municipalidad, 1939). 41 Tell, Entre el
arte y la reproduccin, p. 259n36.
42 For Moreaus involvement with Instituto
Pestalozzi, see Gen, Impresos bajo
fuego.
225
Fig 11 Spread featuring two

photographs signed G. y H.
Coppola. Anuario socialista (Buenos
Aires: La Vanguardia, 1937): pp. ivv.
Top: Miseria de Buenos Aires (Poverty
in Buenos Aires). Bottom: Conventillo
porteo (Buenos Aires Tenement
House). Yale University Library
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Fig 12 Cmo se imprime un libro (How a Book Is Printed) (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Lpez, 1942), n.p. Collection Raul Naon, Buenos Aires
Argentinas absorption of foreign-born artists, writers,

and other thinkers not only politicized its cultural terrain
but also transformed the practical means by which art and
literature were made and disseminated there. Before the mid1930s, the country supported few of its own publishing houses, Sur being a key exception.43 Like most Spanish-speaking
countries, Argentina instead imported books and other printed materials from Spain. With the outbreak of the Spanish
Civil War and the subsequent collapse of Spains publishing
industry, however, Buenos Aires, the chosen refuge of a
number of leading figures in Spains book-producing business, soon became a crucial publishing hub.44 Between 1938
and 1942, three major publishing housesSudamericana,
43 Dora Schwarzstein, Entre Franco

y Pern: memoria e identidad del
exilio republicano espaol en Argentina
(Barcelona: Crtica, 2001), p. 147.
44 Ibid. 45 Silvia Dolinko, Guerra, exilio
e imagines transatlnticas. Un anlisis
de la revista De mar a mar, Ciberletras:
revista de crtica literaria y de cultura/
Journal of Literary Criticism and Culture
23 (July 2010): http://www.lehman.
226
cuny.edu/ciberletras/v23/dolinko.
html. 46 Cuadrado, quoted in Leandro
de Sagastizabal, La edicin de libros
en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Editorial
Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1995),
p. 82.
by providing increased opportunities to publish their work.

Among the photographers most important new backers was
Imprenta Lpez, a Buenos Airesbased printing house that
grew significantly in the early 1940s as it added Emec and
Losada to a client list that already included Sur and a few
other local publishers. Imprenta Lpez turned to Coppola,
Stern, and, once again, Rossi for the book Cmo se imprime
un libro (How a Book Is Printed) (fig. 12), a promotional
volume focused on the firms expertise in graphic design,
layout, and custom typography.47 The book emphatically
recaptures the trios call in Campo Grafico for design and
commercial photography that are responsive to the particular
needs of a given publication. Together, they delineated the
taxing process of matching a books textual and intellectual
content to a set of materials and visual cuesranging from
paper stock to typography, hand-drawn illustrations to
photographic reproductionsthat best relay its goals and
meaning. Stern and Coppolas full-page photographic illustrations, which vary from keenly focused portraits of artists
and editors at work to dynamic photomontage renderings
of the companys state-of-the-art mechanical equipment,
marshal their fluency in vanguard photographic languages
to proclaim the specialized skill and creativity needed to
manufacture a successful publication.
The pairs contributions to the short-lived periodicals
Libertad creadora, De mar a mar, and Correo literario (fig.
13) also augmented their public exposure. The former, edited by Guillermo Korn, was particularly enthusiastic in promoting their work. Stern contributed cover designs, layouts,
and photographic reproductions of historical artworks in the
first two issues, and the journal included full-page reproductions of photographs by both artists. It also advertised upcoming publications by Ediciones de la Llanura, a publishing
house Coppola helped found in 1943 and through which he
and Stern published numerous jointly signed photographs. The
business sought to carve out space for photography-centered
publications within Argentinas new thriving publishing industry. Above all, Ediciones de la Llanura demonstrated the
pairs dedication to improving art historical literacy through
high-quality photographic reproductions by publishing two
lushly illustrated volumes on pre-Columbian art (fig. 14).48
More important than such publicity, however, was
the clear affirmation found in these cultural reviews of the
Losada, and Emecas well numerous smaller ventures

and periodicals, were founded in Buenos Aires.45 Exiles,
especially Spanish Republicans, held significant sway in all
of them. For foreign-born publishing professionals, pursuing
work in the same field in Argentina was a powerful means
of validating and sustaining the hard-won careers they had
been forced to abandon. The impetus to start anew professionallyan instinct Arturo Cuadrado, one of the founders of
Emec, described as repairing our liveswas a drive Stern
knew personally and one that Coppola witnessed in numerous friends as they tried to find their footing in Argentina.46
Argentinas publishing boom benefitted Coppola and
Sterns campaign for avant-garde photography and design
47 Cmo se imprime un libro (Buenos

Aires: Imprenta Lpez, 1942). 48 Horacio
Coppola and Grete Stern, Huacos,

cultura chimu, with text by F. Mrquez
Miranda (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de
la Llanura, 1943); Coppola and Stern,
Huacos, cultura chancay, with text by
F. Mrquez Miranda (Buenos Aires:
Ediciones de la Llanura, 1943).
227
Fig 13 Alberto Denia, Grete Stern, Correo literario 1, no. 2 (December 1, 1943):
p. 5, illustrated with Sterns portraits of Clment Moreau, Attilio Rossi, and Mary
Stewart. University of Iowa Libraries
aesthetic and theoretical principles that Stern and Coppola

had advanced upon their arrival in Buenos Aires in 1935.
Eight years after the couples debut at Surs headquarters,
their brand of modern photography finally gained traction
among a broader set of cultural arbiters in Buenos Aires.
In response to Sterns work, Libertad creadora announced
in 1943 that the art in her photographs resides in their
refined realism, while Correo literario exclaimed that Sterns
images proved photography to be an art of force and an
global fight against totalitarian restrictions on free thought

and expression. This rush of new Buenos Airesbased
magazines, which also included Unidad por la defensa
de la cultura (Unity for the Defense of Culture), Argentina
libre, and Accin Argentina, among others, called on the
countrys cultural leaders to wield their creative talents as
weapons against tyranny. Cross-pollination of ideas was
heavy, with a regular cast of characters, including Coppola
and Sterns friends Romero Brest, Cuadrado, Moreau, Rossi,
and Seoane, contributing simultaneously to multiple titles. At
their core, these publications shared a common conviction,
articulated by the editors of De mar a mar: [Today] brings
with it a decisive moment that requires the man of letters, the
researcher, and the artist to make an urgent moral contribution [. . . .] We are decidedly with those who seek freedom
and hope for their rapid victory over Nazism, Francos
Falange, and Fascism.50 Sterns and Coppolas participation in these journals enlisted their names and their work
in earnest protests against encroachments on personal and
creative liberty. Seen in conjunction with the work they had
completed together in Argentina since 1935, it signaled their
success in transforming photography there from a medium
habitually questioned in relation to tradition-bound fine-art
ideals to a site of radical aesthetics born of creative invention and social engagement.
Fig 14 Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern. Huacos, cultura chancay. Text by
F. Mrquez Miranda. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Llanura, 1943: n.p.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Museum of Modern Art Library
independent art.49 Hard-won praise, these notes confirmed

that Stern and Coppolas demand for a critical consideration of photography on its own terms had firmly taken hold
among key artistic circles in Argentina.
Completed in the last months of their professional
partnership, collaboration with these periodicals also stood
as Coppola and Sterns final joint effort to demonstrate
unambiguously what, in 1935, they had called photographys social function. Libertad creadora, Correo literario,
and De mar a mar were among a larger body of new
publications that gave voice to an appeal from Argentinas
antifascist left for the mobilization of art and literature in a
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49 Lydia Besouchet, La pintura fotogr-
fica de Grete Stern, Libertad creadora

2 (AprilJune 1943): p. 228; Alberto
Denia, Grete Stern, Correo literario
1, no. 2 (December 1, 1943): p. 5.
50 Editorial, De mar a mar 1, no.1
(December 1942): pp. 56.
228
229
Selected Artists Texts and

Writings about the Artists
Index
Acknowledgments
Selected Artists Texts and

Writings about the Artists
Compiled and translated by Rachel Kaplan
OVERCOMING THE POLEMIC (1930)

Horacio Coppola
A fair reading, though perhaps too nave and descriptive,

could be: modern-ours and old-fashionedbefore.
Avant-Garde and Modern Art.
Polemics, a Historical Phenomenon.

Historically, it is necessary for the polemical assessment [of
the new] to prevail over others for a period of time. This
prevalence is explained as a vital necessity of creating
self-awareness by excludingexternallythe presence of
what has occurred previouslynegating its worthwhile
[the new] undergoes its own process of formation: achieving
the clear conviction of a patrimony that becomes our own
as distinct and necessary, it is then accepted, supporting
its own legitimacy, a legitimacy distinct from precedents.
Thus, moments of acute controversy occurin which artists
create with simultaneous desires for art and for the avantgardemoments that each time are closer to a full cultural
life, from established spontaneity, from incorporation of the
modern will as a pure contemporaneous expression with
natural tradition. Each new movement has its avant-garde
and its contrasting affirmation and negation of whole
entities: Positivism and Not-Positivism, Romanticism and
Not-Romanticism, Realism and Not-Realism. The immediate
pattern of the spectator faced with each new movement has
been to affirm and defend one and to deny and attack the
other, according to an external assessment employing polemical criteria based on false conclusions derived from his
understanding of evolution, or if not false, they are imprecise
or inappropriate to justify the assessment. But this immediate pattern can go on changing, reaching a satisfactory
contemporary measurement, when the polemical position of
the spectator ceases to be insurmountable, and in moments
of innocent and propitious abandon, his sensibility, guided
by intuitions favorable to the contrary reasons, he notices
the internal disequilibrium of all that he had affirmed as true
and unique until this moment. Attaining in this way a criteria
freed from prejudices unrelated to the thing being judged,
the modern spirit of today heeds the old-fashionedno
longer oldsubmitting itself to the charm of its entire human
sense and, vice versa, perhaps the outdated spirit reaches a
similar understanding of the modern. From this moment, the
modern spirit notices what is new in the controversial style
with intellectual and almost erudite pleasure. (But even in
The birth of modern artthe art of todayhas existed

amid an exasperating fight against the hostility of the inert
non-modern vision; there has been a way of speaking
about modern art as the avant-garde of modern art, or, as
avant-garde art. It is necessary to stateto denouncethis
error that makes two distinct expressions synonymous,
expressions that are not only used to refer to the same object
but that are employed indiscriminately in order to refer to
two distinct objects: I.) the controversial movement supporting the art of today, and II.) the art of today, modern art.
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Avant-Gardism or Polemics.

Faced with a novel, a painting, a poem of today, the
instinctive spectator capable of discovering and of faithfully experiencing the presence of modern art perceives
adjacent movements of polemical excitement as an integral
part, in a way, of the work itself: metaphors, deformations,
constructions, parts that only achieve a mechanical value
as things present in the work and that dont have their own
redeeming values.
Such a mistake, evident today, began as just a confused
truth: the arbitrary and violent affirmation of the modern way
of living, of today, concealed the dual reality: the polemical
and the authentic. Perhaps because the evaluative position of
the modern artist, as creator or spectator, implied a point of
viewThis IS mine, newas the product of a negation: It IS
NOT the other, old. The new work physiologically demanded the total affirmation of itselfof the bad and the good
of itselfand also the total negation of the alternative. This
description of two periods as opposites can be expressed
simply: new, avant-garde and old, retardataire, a description
that is purely polemical and outside of any cultural category.
The cultural category arises by designating these periods,
without evaluating them individually, with the terms modern and old-fashioned, terms whose meanings note deeper
content and together distort the interpretation of the final
judgment: new-good and old-bad of the polemist account.
230
231
these final moments, many continue affirming and negating:

the professional polemicists, avant-garde or retardataire,
continue experiencingwhether they are deceived or
insincerethe long-standing human delight of negating in
order to affirm, attacking the defeated and defending the
victor. It is this delight that until a short time ago the authentic
artist of today could have experienced in the avant-garde
camp when making or understanding a novel, a painting, a
theory for initiates of the avant-garde, all full of possibilities,
the fervor of camaraderie, and a mouth-watering hostility
towards a cornered enemy.)
To overcome something is more than the negative task of
removing the empty gestures from things. It is starting another positive task and, faced with modern art, attempting an
assessment of the implication of things beyond the mistaken
avant-garde affirmation of our contemporary conscience;
it is affirming the contemporaneity and the consequence of
modern art, being especially concerned with it, experiencing
it reflexively.

Horacio Coppola, Superacin de la polmica,
Clave de Sol 1 (1930): pp. 58.
Clave de Sol 1 (1930): p. 3, inscribed by Horacio Coppola and the journal's three
other editors. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
CAMERA STUDIES: RINGL + PIT (1931)

Traugott Schalcher
ringl + pit are among the very few photographers who study
not only the tone effects, not only the play of light and shade
which builds up the outward forms, but also the line itself.
This care for line is especially apparent in the vegetable
still-life with its especially finely felt lines. This feeling for line
is bound up with freshness of conception, artistic curiosity,
and courage to carry out bold original ideas. Is it not daring
to photograph a well-known society lady (by no means
a mannequin) in full evening dress as a pure back view,
Gebrauchsgraphik. International Advertising Art 8, no. 2 (1931): p. 33.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Museum of Modern Art Library
without the least turn of the head, and thereby to achieve a

good likeness and a refined and original picture? Yet ringl +
pit cannot be said to seek the extravagant. They only like
their bit of fun now and then, as when they photograph a
bit of stuff and label it Fragment of a Bride. They have the
inborn womanly instinct for the delicate nuances of textiles,
and treat a bale of velvet, a bit of striped flannel, or a spool
of sewing silk with tireless and self-sacrificial affection until
the thing delivers up its soul to make their picture. That ringl +
pit should be able to create such a strong and impressive
picture as Barges out of a great city theme so lacking in
charm, indeed so monotonous, seems proof enough of an
unusual degree of artistic instinct.
The old world is discovered anew every day. It is the
task of youth to press forward into new territory, to experience new things by new means, to see with new eyes, to
acquire new convictions, and to absorb these things and
give them forth anew.
Advertisers have seized upon photography with great
ardor, although in the main only because the photograph
can give a lifelike and plastic reproduction of the object
to be advertised. Unfortunately the practical advertising
photograph is but too often entirely lacking in artistic value.
The apparatus catches and reproduces the elementary
force of the object, but too often the retouching process
softens all the power away. ringl + pit declare with especial
emphasis that their pictures are never re-touched. This proof
of strong-mindedness is a welcome sign of the fact that photography has entered upon a new stage. It is no longer the
thing to make a flattering picture, but a characteristic one.
It has been recognized that one should not interfere with
Nature and that all [attempts] to beautify can [only] be a
weakening of the effect and lead to pretty-pretty pictures.
Thus this realm of art is also on the forward march.
Gebrauchsgraphik. International Advertising

Art 8, no. 2 (1931): pp. 3439. The Museum
of Modern Art, New York. The Museum of
Modern Art Library
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Traugott Schalcher, Fotostudien/camera studies: ringl +
pit, E. T. Scheffauer, trans., Gebrauchsgraphik.
International Advertising Art 8, no. 2
(Berlin: Druck und Verlag,1931): pp. 3339.
232
233
Excerpts from
ON FILM AND ITS EXPRESSION: AMERICAN FILM (1931)
Horacio Coppola
It is impossible for us to say anything about film that isnt
already conditioned by the circumstances of our life that lead
us to routinely watch it, a life that we fervently declare when
feeling, when thinking, when wanting that which we feel,
which we think, which we want, coming from an element of
concernour greatest delightfacing this newest source of
creation whose authentic existence we sense in the theater.
Every film that we have seen has influenced our perspective; the experience of our feeling has increased, has
directed our fervor; our intimate knowledge of the past
years has made us malleable and emotional inquisitors. We
have come to know a dimension of American film, short and
intense, from which all of its history ideally can be abstracted to assert its truth: an evident reality, hidden in its constant
presence in front of our most perfect sense. Watching film,
this sense seems to demonstrate itself as the least suitable to
make us see.
In this way, considering American cinema, we understand true impressions only as something that film contains,
something that could well be film itself.
The valuable aspect of American film: presence of life
[. . .] We pursue an understanding of American film, we
search for a valuable meaning in its natural, intimate expression that is directed intrinsically toward the exteriorization
of the historical American being. It is a rich exteriorization
of American life, of the historical experience of man in
America, in the United States. In the films that demand designation as authentic moments of American life (e.g., films created by Griffith or Vidor), there is a revealing exteriorization
of a specific life that the filmmaker gathers from the world
according to an internal instinct (instinctive and interesting,
because film is experienced with the resolve that its creation
holds the future attention of the American man, the future
interest of the films spectator). The filmmaker himself, who
when creating the film is the original spectator of American
life, has a profound internal determination. A spectator, after
being a man historically part of the American experience,
the filmmaker experiences, endures like an American man,

the expressive impulse of that life. Life, that is the authentic
and natural object of the will of films creation.
In this sense we remember, in regards to American film,
the words with which Waldo Frank defines the essential position of the American artist today (a group of current artists):
. . . our artists . . . are literally obligated to take the plastic
form of their vision, from the plasma of their experience
without obeying conceptual legacy or aesthetic tradition.
This new creation, direct from a formal world with materials
existing inside of us, is what I call apocalyptic method, and
its elements are found in our arts. . . . Alfred Stieglietzs [sic]
photographic studies belong to this class. Maybe these latest
(of the current arts) are the most American manifestation,
since the substance of (the American) mans apocalyptic
vision is a document of nature and his tool is a machine.1
Considering the validity of the filmmakers obligation
to reveal American life in his films, and recognizing this
obligation as an instinctive imposition that informs his will of
expression, we seek to understand American film as a product of the desire for an epic expression of American life [. . .]
of photography has at its base the aesthetic value of nature

itself. Franz Roh.) The plastic quality of the photographic element of film (116 second) is not necessary for films expression,
since it is independent from the static element, which by intervening in the film becomes luxurious. Films plastic element is
beyond the photographic element; it lies in the shot, as films
character is essentially dynamic: a shot is the combination
(series) of images in the same visual angle [. . .]
Faced with American film, we see that its will of expression coincides inversely, so to speak, with the qualities of
film: the quality of evident process (the virtual moment when
it is voided as being virtual) is essential to the expression of
American film, but the plastic qualities are not important. A
perfect example is the American shot. The American shot is
when the visual angle spans the image, e.g., of a person,
from a varying height between the knees and the waist up
to the head. If we accept the constructed image as plastic,
a harmonious whole, with a static value in relation to the
process, viewing an American shot as evidence, we conclude that it is the least plastic example possible; we explain
this while recognizing its characteristic virtual quality in a
transcendental extreme, due to the predominance of what
occurs (expressed values) in the films process over the things
that occur (expressive values) [. . .] The films of Chaplin,
Sternberg, Greta Garbo, Al Jolson, and, especially, The
Circus, The Docks of New York, Anna Christie, and The Jazz
Singer are examples of continuous American shots.
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Moments of film considered as processes
Considering a film produced in a cinematographic studio, we

find elements that reveal the quality of the process characteristic of the moment prior to the transposition. In order to use this
analysis, we need to differentiate (not contrast) photography
and film. A film is a collection of elements or images of states
that occur before the camera, normally one every 116 second.
Each element is a photograph in the movie and a state in its
duration [. . .] Photography, independent from film, possesses
the essential value of being a plastic image. And its plastic
expression is determined by the existing relation between
the photographed object and the segmentation as an image
that the camera makes of it. Photography is an image of an
object that is strengthened by its quality of being a segment,
by the necessity to keep in mind the (static) segmentation as
an organic and intrinsic value of its expression: photography
is conditioned by the exclusion of the (spatial and temporal)
other from the object in a way that the excluded parts either
matter or dont in order to express the object, in order to
organize it as an expressive image. (Aesthetically the value
Film moments as processes organized by the filmmaker
[. . .] Whether in the studio or not, when something is

organized in front of the camera by the express will of the
filmmaker, the resulting film is, essentially, a creation. The
minimal act of creation on the part of man is to intervene in
the conception of the process as such: as an example, it is
sufficient to mention White Shadows in the South Seas as
opposed to a documentary in the strict sense, With Byrd at
the South Pole.
Presence of life
That is to say, the possibility to create an organized film exists according to a process imposed on spontaneous reality
1 Here Coppola cites Waldo Franks

The Rediscovery of America (1929).
Italics and parenthetical notations are
Coppolas.
234
235
by collecting filmed fragments of nature, fragments that compose a new synthesis, which is human insofar as it responds
to the clear and unique conception of the filmmaker.
Butalways with American filmthis process interests
us more as it possesses a rigorously human content than as a
work by man. In American film the filmmaker directly gathers
the expressive states of a reality that he presents before the
camera. His intervention when creating the film is presenting
before the camera, and with the camera, a living reality: a
process of human feeling [. . .]
The specific American value
[. . .] We have analyzed the manner in which film is used as
an instrument of the American filmmakers will: as such it is
not the image that is of interest in a films vision but rather
realitythe American submerges us in the reality that is
seen. What matters before the camerawhat will matter
after the imageis this process imbued with human meaning. This specific act of forgetting the image in American film
is not an oversight by the filmmaker: he arranges images that
are voided and that disappear as they do in the American
life that contains them.
Overcoming time
Creation responds to a historical determination, to an
American experience. A film is composed of images of
something that existed and occurred in concrete time and
space. The filmmakers creation responds voluntarily to
an intention that seeks to historically present something
that is reproduced before the camera, something that is
from American experience and that is opportune to being
revived by the American. It is revived as a historically concrete life, not as the past, not as the future, but as occurring
in a historic present for the films spectator. It is in this sense
that American film can be considered an epic expression of
American life [. . .]
From Horacio Coppola, Sobre Cine. De la expresin.
El cine Americano, Clave de Sol 2 (1931): pp. 723.
ARTISTS STATEMENT (1935)

Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern
ON PHOTOGRAPHY (1937)
Horacio Coppola
The photographic image is the result of two acts: the preparation of the shot and, second, the photographic process.
The first part is conditioned and directed by the free and
subjective activity of the photographer based on his precise
knowledge of the photographic process. In that first part, the
photographer makes a selection of the photogenic values of
the object. This selection is not mechanical. Through it, the
photographer expresses his intuition of the object and his
understanding, his knowledge of the object. He chooses the
fullest perspective of the object, its spatial arrangement; he
determines the proportion of light and dark, the areas that
are in sharp focus and those that are not, the plastic and
morphological values that define the object and its materials.
This act of free and subjective preparation ends the moment
exposure occurs. The photographic technique is an opticalchemical process that obtains from an object a detailed
image with a range of shades that includes intermediary
tones (halftones). To void this process, or to modify it with
subsequent manual treatment, is to deprive the photographic
technique of its specific properties. That this optical-chemical
process as such is independent from the free and subjective
activity of the photographer does not mean that photography
is a less appropriate means of human expression than other
techniques that use manual processes. In a strict sense, the
technical photographic process only verifies the photographers subjective representation in front of the object: his
understanding of the object. Is photography an art? In fact,
photography has refrained from addressing this issue: it has
created its own place in todays life; it has a social function.
The images of things and beings that photography allows
to be produced indicate a fundamentally new possibility of
knowledge and expression given photographys specific
ability to detail and insist upon the reality of those beings
and things.
[Editors note to the original text]: This article, written for

CAMPO GRAFICO, is one of the rare writings in which an
absolute interest in clarity overcomes the polemic temptation.
Readers will find in incisive form an exact definition of
photography as an optical-chemical phenomenon, at the
service of the intelligent and sensible faculties of man. The
controversial windbaggery about whether photography is an
art or not is greatly lessened when confronted with a modern
desire that is so inquisitive and disciplined.
In the statement that we publish on a separate page,
Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola tell us: Is photography
an art? In fact, photography has refrained from addressing
this issue: it has created its own place in todays life; it has a
social function.
Campo Grafico in its fourth year of life, with its
functionalist polemic, has always favored the real and
very important function of typography in modern life at the
Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern, artists statement from

the flyer for their joint exhibition at the headquarters of
Sur, Buenos Aires, October 1935.
236
expense of obsolete and short-sighted aspirations of situating

typography in the realm of art, poetry, etc.
In the following statement, I bring together ideas, opinions,

and analyses that have been the subject of my reflections for
some time. I have read them in books, in magazines; I have
learned and discussed them with my teachers and classmates, with photographers and friends; I have sensed them
and I have tried to implement them; and above all, I have
shared them with my partner.
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The reality of things, of the object
We look with our eyes and we see things, objects. Only

rarely do we look at objects to see them for themselves. We
look at a book to read it, a closet to open it, a mirror to see
the reflected image. These objects are made from a given
material, with a given surface, form, color, and volume. The
237
book is smooth or rough paper, ink, a bunch of pages, a

prism. This material, this surface, form, and volume, reflects
material, reflects part of the light that illuminates it: they are
visible objects; they are objects that exist for the photographic
camera. They can be defined as such: bodies of all types
in rest and in motion, as well as the phenomena between
bodies; not only bodies in a solid state but also those like
water and air have the property of reflecting light. In certain
cases these bodies can only reflect part of light, as infrared
rays are not visible to the human eye but are visible with the
photographic camera.
So the photographic camera is a visual machine, that
is, a human eye mechanically enhanced by the vision that is
obtained from what it sees, an image preserved on glass, celluloid, paper, etc. It is an optical-chemical phenomenon. The optical part is the camera obscura. Ramn y Cajal (the Spanish
scientist) recalls that when he was a child, he was often shut in
a dark room at school, a practice that existed then as a means
of punishment. He couldnt resign himself to remain alone and
without light, and one day he made a hole in the wall that

1937): pp. 57. Museum Folkwang,
Essen, Germany.
he knew bordered the street. The light entered through this

opening and with it, projecting on the opposite wall, entered
images of the street and images of the people passing by. He
had discovered, unwittingly, a well-known optical phenomenon. The men who first discovered this phenomenon had
already perfected the projection of the image by placing lenses
over the opening: they invented the photographic lens.
The lens directs rays of light, correcting the direction of
many of them, so that the image retains its exact form and
can be in sharp focus. With the discovery of chemical rays
that are transformed by the action of the light rays, or the
so-called photo-chemical phenomenon, the camera was completed. It allowed images of bodies, of visible objects, to be
fixed on glass, celluloid, paper, etc. I remember in this way
that which everyone knows. In addition: when I think, imagine, see, and create a photograph, these natural phenomena
that science calls optical-chemical are not, for me, just technical skills, but they exist as natural phenomena in relation to
direct emotion. There are phenomena that the photographer
lives, as the painter lives the composition of color and tastes
the brushstroke on the canvas. This emotional awareness
of the photographic camera is part of the possibility for
personal expression on the part of the photographer in the
creation of a photograph. The photographers vision orto
continue this statement with strict objectivitythe image of
the object, is not produced just by the photographic camera,
but it continues to be produced in the chemical process that
reveals the latent image on the plate or film and, later, when
the copy or positive image is obtained.
The photographer has experienced, has studied,
knowseven emotionallythe photographic process. He
knows exactly how objects that reflect light are seen through
the camera: the material, its surface, its form, its volume.
He then possesses a complete instrument for producing and
materializing a given image. We characterize this instrument
as the photographic process.
That which allows seeing and fixing

The construction of the photographic camera, the elaboration
of the negative and positive material, all the improvements
and all the new investigations and discoveries, since the
birth of photography, have had the definitive intention of
238
obtaining an instrument with which man can obtain images

from visible objects with the greatest possible faithfulness to
their reality. Considering photography as the fruit of a desire
for realism, I will list the factors that characterize the photographic instrument.
The optical mechanism of the camera and the photographic material allow one to capture the exact details of an
object, the precise details of its material, of its surface. This
detail, this image, is reproduced in a scale of shades that
even includes intermediary tones or halftones. An image is
obtained from the form and volume of the object, which is
characterized as such: it is an image from a particular point
of view. The resulting image, a glimpse of an object projected
onto a surface, is directly conditioned by the point of view: a
cube, for example, is only a square if the point of view is in
front of the center of one of the faces, or it is only a rectangle
split in two parts if it is in front of an edge; in order to have
the most complete view, the point of view should be in front
of a polyhedral corner to see as much of the three faces as
possible from one vantage point. The photograph, like any
other process of graphic representation of an image on a flat
surface, is a projection, a partial view. But making a drawing,
the draftsman can add on the same sheet, in one image, two
or more views of an object that he has observed from different
points of view. The photographer only has one point of view
in space. The photographer can superimpose images from
different points of view, but any image is inevitably the angle
from one point of view. The photographer also has only one
point of view in time: the parts of the object must be facing the
photographic camera at the same time. This is not an absolute
requirement: anyone who has held a camera in their hands
has taken two photographs on the same negative, for the most
part by accident, a few other times as an experiment. Despite
the possibility of superimposing images in space and time,
I think it is necessary to characterize the regular use, so to
speak, of the photographic machine, defining the photographic image as one view of an object from a unique point of view
in space and time. Two factors still remain: the transcription of
color into a scale of black-and-white tones and the fact that the
photographic image is an image of a fragment of reality.
In the photographic image, natural colors are transcribed to black and white according to a scale of tones
that have intensity values equivalent to the tone of the same
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239

1937): pp. 811. Museum Folkwang,
Essen, Germany
natural colors. Therefore, the blue color and the red color of
an object are transcribed in gray tones equivalent to the blue
tone and the red tone.
And as we have already discussed in depth, the
black-and-white scale also contains intermediate tones and
halftones.
The last factor: the photographic image is the image
of a fragment of reality; it is that rectangle that precisely
individualizes the fragment, limiting it, isolating it, defining it,
almost as a new autonomous reality. As such, this rectangle
is an integral part in the construction of the image, and it
signifies an equilibrant relationship of the images organization with a new autonomous reality. The images equilibrium
is determined by its content and by the degree to which, in
taking the photograph, it excludes the reality of which this
object formed a part.
The photographers will and human expression

Photography is an instrument through which man can
produce an image of an object with the degree of faithfulness that I have discussed. This possibility of photographys
realism is its essence, its specific quality. Photographic
faithfulness is the same element from which arises the photographers will to permanently fix on paper his vision of the
visible object, of the thing. The photographer uses and is
served by this faithfulness: he adjusts it, limits it, emphasizes
it. The photographer sees, analyzes, knows the visible reality
of objects, of things, to later capture and fix a photographic
image of an object of his choosing, materializing the visible
values that interest his feelings and his will and his fantasies.
The photographer makes a selection of values on the basis of
his precise knowledge of the mechanism and of the photographic process. This selection signifies that the photographer has completed a decisive intellectual task; based on his
intuition of the object, on his comprehension and knowledge,
he selects the most complete view of the object, of its spatial
order; he determines the proportions of chiaroscuro; he puts
in sharp focus the details or parts of the object that he wants
to fix with precision and faithfulness, he gradates the values
of the less-sharp parts that remain of the object; he accentuates in this way the plastic and morphological values that
define the object and its material. This selection of values,
240
this determination of the extent to which these processes are

used in the realization of the photographic image, constitute
photographys elements of expression, or rather are the
expression of the photographer himself. Photography, an
optical-chemical mechanism, is therefore an instrument of the
will of the photographer, of his intuition and understanding,
of his human consciousness. It is the expression of a human
that is interested in the visible reality of beings and of things
and that has created the instrument capable of detailing and
insisting on the visible reality of these beings and things.
The visible aspect is one of the vehicles through which man
can communicate with the intimate reality of beings and
things, whose visible aspect isto an extentone possibility
of expression of intimate reality.
It is important to add: the photographic camera possesses the capacity to detail and insist upon the visible
reality of beings and things, but this doesnt mean that it
can always capture this reality. Photography is an instrument at the service of the human consciousness of reality.
The human eye is also able to see the visible reality of an
object, but this visible reality exists to the degree in which
the human knows it as such and to the degree in which he
considers this reality.
By this I mean to say that visible reality will be captured
by the photographic machine provided that the photographer already knows this reality, and the photographic image
will not only be the expression of the photographer to the
degree in which he knows visible reality but also to the degree in which the photographer consciously or unconsciously
knows the intimate reality of the object that emerges from a
shared visible reality. Through the work of chance and given
the mechanical perfection of the photographic camera, a
photographic image full of meaning might result as a product of the mechanical use that one person can make of this
camera. But the isolated and random fact may be of interest
to the extent that it reveals the possibility of this medium,
which the conscious man puts at the service of his will.
NOTES ON PHOTOMONTAGE (1967)

Grete Stern
Some years ago the magazine Idilio, from Editorial Abril,
dedicated one of its pages to the interpretation of dreams. It
was titled: Psychoanalysis Will Help You. It was a moment
in which the concepts of psychoanalytic ideas penetrated
every level of society, and these pages were warmly received
by the primarily female reading public.
I remember that the literary-interpretative part of the new
section was under the direction of Professor Gino Germani,
well known in academic circles, who signed the notes with
the pseudonym Richard Rest. For the photographic illustration
of the interpreted dreams, Editorial Abril sought my collaboration. I proposed using photomontages.
The work was carried out more or less like this: Germani
gave me the text of the dream, a faithful copy in the majority of cases of one of the many letters that had been sent
to Editorial Abril requesting an interpretation. Sometimes,
before beginning my task, I spoke with Germani about the
interpretation. In general, it happened that Germani made
requests about the layout: that it should be horizontal or vertical, or that the foreground be darker than the background,
or to represent restless forms. On other occasions, he told me
that a figure should appear doing this or that, or he insisted
that I use animals or floral elements.
Now then, what is a photomontage? An approximate
definition: the joining of different photographs, preexisting or
taken for this purpose, in order to create a new photographic composition. In this way numerous possibilities for the
composition arise, among them the juxtaposition of implausible elements. For example: a woman in a bathing suit, in a
ballroom, leading an elephant. In addition, the proportions
of the elements used in the montage can be distorted. In this
way, it is not difficult at all for a child to appear to be seated
on a fly that represents an airplane, flying over a forest of
cabbage. Also, perspective can be distorted: a man photographed from above observes some towers or trees photographed from below. The distorted perspective will always
give the effect of the unstable, of the implausible. It should
be added that, in contrast, correct perspective is essential for
other cases, such as the child seated on the fly, because here
exact perspective graphically increases the veracity.
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Horacio Coppola, Della Fotografia, Campo Grafico 5,
no. 3 (March 1937): pp. 811.
241
There are various techniques for the production of a photomontage. For example, the elements that comprise it can be
projected directly onto photographic paper with an enlarger:
the enlarger is moved according to the desired size; the paper
that receives the projection is moved according to the place
that the image should occupy; parts of the negative or of the
paper can be covered so that the entire negative is not projected, or to leave white areas on the paper to receive other
projections and to avoid one photograph covering another,
though this may often be the sought-after effect.
The montages that I am exhibiting are made in another
way. First I prepare a sketch, a pencil drawing that indicates
the layout and the photographic elements that will compose
the montage. We see: a background of clouds, a sandy
beach in the foreground, on which we see a glass bottle with
a girl enclosed inside. I enlarge the negatives according to
this sketch. I get the clouds and the beach from negatives in
my archive. I take a photograph of a girl seated in the position indicated by the sketch. I enlarge it to a size that allows
it to be placed behind a real bottle, in a way that produces
the impression that the girl is enclosed in the bottle. I photograph the arrangement and cut it out. Then I experiment with
the tone of the backgroundsthe sky with clouds and the
sandy beachso that they emphasize the bottle. I also play
with the size of the bottle in respect to the background, seeing which tonalities and relative size I prefer. I am inclined to
this system, which allows me to make choices visually, not
intellectually, moving and changing the photographic elements
until I reach the composition that satisfies me. Next I put the
photographs in the chosen order. If I think it is necessary, I
add graphic elements, such as shadows, emphasized edges,
etc. Retouching is also useful in montage, adding or erasing
what one desires. In this case, we find ourselves before a
combination of graphic and photographic elements.
Another way of working, which is more complicated than
the one I just described, but that produces good effects of
space, light, shadow, and verisimilitude, is the following: the
different photographs that form the montage are placed
either loose, between pieces of glass, or supported on sticks
or boxesin their corresponding order as if they were a
stage set. If it seems necessary, I can leave some elements out
of focus. In the background, the clouds; the sandy beach closer to the camera; and, at the edge of the beach, or between
the beach and clouds, the little bottle with the girl. No photograph touches another. This gives the possibility to produce
new effects by way of the lighting. Finally, I photograph the
entire scene.
Photomontage is also used for other purposes. Architects,
sculptors, and decoratorsespecially those in theateruse it
often. Its application demands a great control of perspective
and proportion. Concerning what I have said, I am going
to discuss a case I think is interesting. A sculptor designed
a monument to be erected in a certain place in the city. He
submitted a reduced-size figure to the corresponding competition and added a photomontage where the sculpture could
be seen installed in its intended destination. In order to create
the photomontage, it was necessary to first photograph the
specified place. The sculptor chose the point of view, and the
photographer had to decide: 1) at what height he should place
the camera; 2) what should be the position of the sun in the moment of the shot. The photographer took two shots: one where
the background or the distant areas were as sharp as the close
areas, and the second leaving the distant areas out of focus.
The next photograph was of the small monument. Here,
also, the sculptor selected the angle of observation. The
photographer had to calculate at what height from the small
monument to place the camera lens and, additionally, he had
to select the position of the lights so that the effect produced
would correspond to the effect of the sun in the previous photographic scene. Again he made two photographs: one with
the background in focus, the other with the background out of
focus. For the final shot he didnt paste the photograph of the
monument over the photo of the city, but he placed it in front
of it, obtaining in this way a great effect of volume.
Photomontage is also used for advertising purposes,
now with less intensity than ten or fifteen years ago. But it
is always interesting for producing book covers, advertisements, and posters. Outside of the catalogue, I present here
some of my works created for advertising.
A few days ago I saw in a bookstore a book that recommends and explains the use of photomontage. I observed
some rare montages: the combination of different parts from
various faces, achieving unusual expressions. For montage
work it is extremely useful to have a large collection of magazines. Seeing many photographs opens the field to suggestions and stimulates ideas.
1 Sterns chronology here is inaccurate,

as Dada emerged in Zurich during the
midst of World War I. Cabaret Voltaire
both opened and closed in 1916,
though the Dada movement continued
and expanded. The cabaret hosted
exhibitions and published one issue
of an eponymous magazine, which
included works by Picasso and Marinetti.
Richard Huelsenbecks title, which Stern
242
When a photomontage is destined for a publication, we

must take the precaution to not use faces or figures of people
without their authorization. Once, in a montage for Editorial
Abril, I showed the face of a girl looking at her hand. Each
one of her fingers was replaced by the figure of a different
man. For this work I used figures of models from my archive,
whose approval was assured. But I was missing the figure
of a man for the thumb: he had to be short, fat, and without
a hat. I recalled a photograph of a group of workers that I
had taken years before. There was a man with the characteristics I sought. I pasted his photograph over the thumb and
handed in the work. Days after the magazine appeared, the
editorial offices informed me that a widow, very offended,
had appeared asking where they got the photograph of her
deceased husbandthe man on the thumband who had
authorized its reproduction. I explained the details of the
case to the authorities of Abril, and they gave my name and
telephone number to the woman. I was prepared to assume
responsibility for this rather unforeseen situation, but the
woman never contacted me.
Photographers were not the first ones to make a globally
recognized graphic medium from this play with photographs,
but rather the visual artists who comprised the Dada and
Surrealist movements. They discovered in the photograph a
new and distinct element for the production of their compositions, in combination with drawing and painting.
Dada was an artistic movement that was created in
Zurich, Switzerland, in early 1919, meaning World War
I had barely ended. Young visual artists and writers from
various European countries met daily in a cabaret named
Voltaire. They all opposed war and nationalism, and
invited artists of all types and the public to participate by
offering suggestions and formulating proposals. Picasso
and Marinetti were among the first. In truth, Dada presented
itself against all of the existing -isms: Cubism, Futurism,
Expressionism, etc. It had the intention of upsetting the
public. And this purpose was largely achieved. The presentations made in the cabaret were so strange, so eccentric, that
they produced very violent reactions from the public.1
In Berlin, Dada had a more political tone. Huelsenbeck,
the known leader of Dada, was Commissar of Fine Arts
of the German Revolution. Other collaborators of international
renown were George Grosz, the extraordinary draftsman, and
John Heartfield, who utilized photomontage for book covers

for his Malik publishing house and applied an arbitrary typography to posters that contained political statements. Another
was Kurt Schwitters, painter, draftsman, and poet, who was
not politically engaged. He wrote long poems composed
only of sounds, which he himself recited singing, screaming,
whistling, and dancing around a statue in an art gallery in
Hannover where he lived. All of this was similar to the presentations that occurred in Zurich, and it is, fifty years later,
the direct precursor to what today we call Happenings.
Schwitters made montages utilizing photographs, scraps of
paper, buttons, or any other object he found on his walks.
The photographer Man Ray belonged to Dada. He was
North American, but he took up residency in Paris. He presented Rayograms, which were cameraless photographs, or
plays with light and shadow cast by objects on positive and
negative material.
In 1924, poets and artistsyoung people, all of them,
among them some adolescentsfounded the Surrealist
movement, which can be understood as a continuation of
Dada, with greater importance and emphasis in regards to its
influence, its demands, and consequently, what it produced.
I will name some of the best-known visual artists of Surrealism:
Dal, Tanguy, Magritte. And again, the photographer Man
Ray. One of his most widely disseminated montages is the one
representing the beautiful lips of a woman in a sky covered
by little clouds, over a dark, neutral landscape. He called it
lheure de lobservatoireles Amoureux (Observatory
TimeThe Lovers). A detail to emphasize: the title of a photomontage always performs a very important role.
Andr Breton, the leader of Surrealism, said in a declaration of the movement: To me, the strongest image is that
which presents the greatest degree of arbitrariness. An interpretation of these words could be the following: in Dada and
Surrealism, remnants from the romanticism of the last century
are presented, together with the rejection of everything that
is known and an enormous value of invention. Today we are
living in the age of inventions: flying saucers, machines that
replace man in his daily chores, and other things that no one
thought possible in 1930.
One year before the birth of Surrealism, another
movement arose in Germany that was called Die neue
Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), which sought to present the
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subsequently references, was selfproclaimed and never official, a typical

Dada joke.
243
objective image, opposed to all sentimentalism. In effect,

photography can offer the objective representation of a
thing, especially if showing it without its context. Many
Dada artists made self-portraits combining the objectivity of
a cropped photograph with the romantic-inventive personal
gesture. In a work titled Mask to Insult the Aesthetes, we see
half of a womans body, her low-cut dress adorned with a
rose, the oval of her face covered with a montage of photographs and newspaper clippings.
To finish, I will describe advertisementsphotomontages
reproduced in a book dedicated to Dada and Surrealism. The
first ad is from 1906 from an English magazine, created with
clear naivet. We see a group of well-dressed men and women, and in the background, a factory with its chimneys. In the
gray sky, hanging over the whole scene, a corset with garters,
like those used by women of the time. At the bottom we read:
Party in the Garden of the Royal Corset Company. The other
ad is from 1936, from a magazine for womens clothing. It is
presented with advertising skill. We see the oval of a face, cut
from smooth fabric; threads of knitting wool form the hair; two
buttons in place of eyes; another thread suggests the nose;
and a small semi-open zipper is the mouth. The caption says:
Most slide fasteners suffer from exposure. The translation
isnt easy, as it gives way to a double interpretation. It can
mean that the majority of zippers remain open or that very
active zippers suffer precisely for being too active.
To debate whether or not photography is an art seems to
me a waste of time, because the field of definitions is infinite,
well worn, and controversial, and no definition can deny the
importance that photography has in the social, political, and
expressive life of people today.
For me, in any case, photography is a means with which
I express myself and that requires, as Julio Cortzar states in
his story Las babas del diablo (The Devils Drool), that one
possess discipline, aesthetic education, and steady hands.
Grete Stern, Apuntes sobre fotomontaje, text read at
the Foto Club Argentino, Buenos Aires, September 1967.
Published in Luis Priamo, Hugo Vezzetti, and Grete Stern,
Sueos. Fotomontajes de Grete Stern. Serie completa.
Edicin de la obra impresa en la revista Idilio (19481951)
(Buenos Aires: Fundacin CEPPA, 2004), pp. 2933.
Compiled by Rachel Kaplan
Entries for each section are arranged chronologically.
Tell, Vernica. Entre el arte y la reproduccin: el lugar de la fotografa. In

Andrea Giunta and Laura Malosetti Costa, eds., Arte de posguerra. Jorge
Romero Brest y la revista Ver y Estimar, 24362. Buenos Aires: Paids,
2005.
. Latitud-Sur: The Aesthetic-Political Coordinates of Modern
Photography in Argentina. In Marta Graciela Martinez, ed., Territorios
de dilogo [Entre los realismos y lo surreal] 19301945, 195201.
Buenos Aires: Fundacin Mundo Nuevo, 2006.
Group Exhibition Catalogues and Books

Publications by or with Collaboration of the Artists
Coppola, Horacio. Buenos Aires: Visin fotogrfica por Horacio Coppola.
Texts by Alberto Prebisch and Ignacio B. Anzotegui. 1st edition. Buenos
Aires: Municipalidad de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1936.
Campo Grafico. Rivista di estetica e di tecnica grafica (Milan) 5, no. 3
(March 1937).
Coppola, Horacio. Buenos Aires: Visin fotogrfica por Horacio Coppola.
Texts by Alberto Prebisch and Ignacio B. Anzotegui. 2nd edition. Buenos
Aires: Municipalidad de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1937.
Ilustraciones fuera del texto. In ngel M. Gimnez and Guillermo Korn,
eds., Anuario socialista, 25, 3234, 39. Buenos Aires: La Vanguardia,
1937.
Imprenta Lpez. Cmo se imprime un libro. Buenos Aires: Imprenta Lpez,
1942.
Coppola, Horacio, and Grete Stern. Huacos, cultura chancay. Text by
Fernando Mrquez Miranda. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Llanura,
1943.
Coppola, Horacio, and Grete Stern. Huacos, cultura chimu. Text by
Fernando Mrquez Miranda. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Llanura,
1943.
Articles, Essays, and Reviews
Zervos, Christian. Nouvelles Photographies. Cahiers dArt (Paris) nos. 14
(1934): 7076.
Exposicin de fotografas de Horacio Coppola y Grete Stern, que se inaugurar maana en el local de Sur, Viamonte 548. La Prensa (Buenos
Aires), October 6, 1935.
Una exposicin de estudios fotogrficos. La Nacin (Buenos Aires),
October 6, 1935: 2.
Romero Brest, Jorge. Fotografas de Horacio Coppola y Grete Stern. Sur
(Buenos Aires) 5, no. 13 (October 1935): 91102.
Rossi, Attilio. II Saln de Artistas Decoradores. Sur (Buenos Aires) 7, no.
34 (July 1937): 9295.
Hay Mucho Que Ver . . . Fotografas por Grete Stern y Horacio Coppola.
Libertad Creadora (Buenos Aires) 1 (JanuaryMarch 1943): n.p., inserts.
Biselli, Ruben. Tecnologas comunicacionales y procesos culturales modernizadores: El lugar de la fotografa en la revista Sur durante la dcada
del 30. In La trama de la comunicacin: Anuario del Departamento de
Ciencias de la Comunicacin 7, 1936. Rosario, Argentina: Universidad
Nacional de Rosario, Laborde Editor, 2002.
Jimnez, Carlos. Betting on Photographic Narratives. Art Nexus 3, no. 55
(JanuaryMarch 2005): 11214.
244
Exposition Internationale de la Photographie Contemporaine. Paris: Muse

des Arts Dcoratifs, Pavillion de Marsan, 1936.
Fiedler, Jeannine, ed. Photography at the Bauhaus. Cambridge, Mass.:
The M.I.T. Press, 1990. English edition of Fotografie am Bauhaus. Berlin:
Bauhaus-Archiv, 1990.
Encuentro de Fotografa Latinoamericana: La modernidad en el sur Andino;
Incisin, apropiacin; Imagema; La conciencia del fotgrafo. Caracas:
Galera Los Espacios Clidos, Ateneo de Caracas, 1993.
Facio, Sara. La fotografa en la Argentina: desde 1840 a nuestros das.
Buenos Aires: La Azotea, 1995.
Parr, Martin, and Gerry Badger. The Photobook: A History. Volume 2.
London: Phaidon, 2006.
Fontanals-Cisneros, Ella, and Cecilia Fajardo-Hill. Fortunate Objects:
Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection. Milan: Charta,
2007.
Ledezma, Juan, ed. The Sites of Latin American Abstraction. Milan: Charta;
Miami: CIFO, 2007.
Fernndez, Horacio, ed. The Latin American Photobook. New York:
Aperture, 2011.
Groothuis, Marjan, and Facundo de Zuvira, eds. Fotografa Argentina.
Coleccin Rabobank. Buenos Aires: Rabo Trading Argentina, 2011.
Light of Modernity in Buenos Aires (19291954): Photographs by Annemarie
Heinrich, Horacio Coppola, Sameer Makarius, Anatole Saderman, Grete
Stern, Juan Di Sandro. Essay by Valeria Gonzlez. Translated by Craig
Epplin. New York: Nailya Alexander Gallery, 2011.
Mendelson, Jordana, ed. Encounters with the 1930s. Madrid: Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa and La Fbrica, 2012.
Pulses of Abstraction in Latin America. The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection.
Madrid: Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, 2012.
Rinaldini, Julio. Conocimiento de Buenos Aires. Cabalgata (Buenos Aires)

2, no. 7 (January 14, 1947): 1213.
Williams, Amancio. Casa Habitacin en Mar del Plata. La Arquitectura de
Hoy (Buenos Aires) 1, no. 2 (February 1947): 7589.
Casa en Mar del Plata. Amancio Williams y Delfina G. de Williams.
Nuestra Arquitectura (Buenos Aires) 8 (August 1947).
Stern, Grete. Foto-composicin. Arte Mad Universal (Buenos Aires) 2
(October 1948): n.p.
Rest, Richard [Enrique Butelman and Gino Germani]. El psicoanlisis te
ayudar. Idilio (Buenos Aires) 110 (October 26December 28, 1948).
. El psicoanlisis le ayudar. Idilio (Buenos Aires) 11140 (January
4, 1949July 24, 1951).
Fundacin de Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires: Estudio del Plan de Buenos Aires,
de la Municipalidad, c. 1949.
Gonzlez Capdevila, Ral. Amancio Williams. Buenos Aires: Universidad
de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Instituto de Arte
Americano e Investigaciones Estticas, 1955.
Rodrguez, Ernesto B. Noem Gerstein. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Galatea,
1955.
Klappenbach, Horacio Ral, and Grete Stern. Buenos Aires. French translation by Andre Rigaud; English translation by Federico Schonbach. Buenos
Aires: Ediciones Peuser, 1956.
Stern, Grete. Cultura diaguita. Catamarca, Argentina: Museo Arquelogico
Adn Quiroga, 1964.
. Grete Stern: relato fotogrfico de un viaje: realizado en cumplimiento de una beca del Fondo Nacional de las Artes. Buenos Aires: Museo de
Arte Moderno, 1965.
Salas, Alberto Mario, and Grete Stern. Arquitectura de Buenos Aires: Los
Patios. Buenos Aires: Arte, 1967.
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GRETE STERN
Publications by or with Collaboration of the Artist
Kunst und Knstler (Berlin) 28, no. 11 (1930): cover.

Roesmann, Matwej. Fischbein streckt die Waffen. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer
Verlag, 1931.
Tudor Hart, Edith, and Grete Stern. South London Hospital for Women and
Children. London: South London Hospital for Women and Children, 1935.
Colaboracin. De Mar a Mar (Buenos Aires) 2, no. 7 (June 1943): n.p.,
insert.
Spencer, Douglas Arthur. La fotografa al da. Translated by Grete Stern.
Buenos Aires: Editorial Nova, 1944.
Serrano Plaja, Arturo. Manuel ngeles Ortiz. Buenos Aires: Editorial
Poseidn, 1945.
Solo Exhibition Catalogues and Books
Ben Gullco, Jorge. Stern. Pintores Argentinos del Siglo XX, no. 101. Serie
Complementaria: Fotgrafos Argentinos del Siglo XX, no. 5. Buenos Aires:
Centro Editor de Amrica Latina, 1982.
Facio, Sara. Fotografa en la Argentina 19371981. Grete Stern. Buenos
Aires: La Azotea, 1988.
Eskildsen, Ute, with Susanne Baumann. Grete Stern, Ringl + Pit, Ellen
Auerbach. Essen: Fotografinnen and Museum Folkwang, 1993.
Monz, Josep Vicent, ed. Grete Stern. Valencia: Institut Valenci dArt
Modern, 1995.
Priamo, Luis. Grete Stern, obra fotogrfica en la Argentina. Buenos Aires:
Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 1995.
Rhlmann, Ulrike, ed. Los Sueos. Trume. Photomontagen von Grete
Stern. Aachen, Germany: Museen der Stadt Aachen/Suermondt Ludwig
Museum, 1998.
Priamo, Luis, ed. Fotomontajes de Grete Stern. Serie completa. Edicin de la
obra impresa en la revista Idilio (19481951). Buenos Aires: Fundacin
CEPPA, 2004.
Guigon, Emmanuel, andSophie Bernard, et al. Grete Stern. Berlin-Buenos
Aires. Besanon, France: Muse des Beaux-Arts et dArchologie, 2008.
Schwartz, Jorge, ed. Os sonhos de Grete Stern: fotomontagens. Sao Paulo:
Museu Lasar Segall, Instituto Moreira Salles, 2009.
Berta, Paula. La Cmara en el umbral de lo sensible. Grete Stern y la revista Idilio (19481951). Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2010.
Faillace, Magdalena, ed. Grete Stern de la Bauhaus al Gran Chaco.
Fotoreportaje de aborgenes del norte argentino (19581964). Buenos
245
Aires: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Comercio Internacional y Culto,

2010.
Schalcher, Traugott. Fotostudien/camera studies: ringl + pit. Translated by
E. T. Scheffauer. Gebrauchsgraphik. International Advertising Art (Berlin)
8, no. 2 (1931): 3339.
Besouchet, Lydia. La pintura fotogrfica de Grete Stern. Libertad Creadora
(Buenos Aires) 2 (AprilJune 1943): 22529.
Denia, Alberto. Grete Stern. Correo Literario (Buenos Aires), December 1,
1943: 5.
Walsh, Mara Elena. Los desnudos faciales de Grete Stern. Sur (Buenos
Aires) nos. 215216 (SeptemberOctober 1952): 146.
Lavin, Maud. ringl + pit: The Representation of Women in German
Advertising, 192933. The Print Collectors Newsletter 16, no. 3 (July
August 1985): 8993. Revised and reprinted in Lavin, Clean New World:
Culture, Politics, and Graphic Design, 5067. Cambridge, Mass.:
The M.I.T. Press, 2001.
Keller, Judith, and Katherine Ware. Women Photographers in Europe,
19191939. History of Photography 18, no. 3 (Autumn 1994): 21922.
Plotkin, Mariano Ben. Tell Me Your Dreams: Psychoanalysis and Popular
Culture in Buenos Aires, 19301950. The Americas 55, no. 4 (April
1999): 60129.
Becquer Casaballe, Amado. Grete Stern. Fotomundo (Buenos Aires) 382
(1999): 2427.
Sykora, Katharina. Doppelspiele ber die fotografische Zusammenarbeit
von Ringl + Pit alias Grete Stern und Ellen Auerbach. In Renate Berger,
ed., Liebe Macht Kunst. Knstlerpaare im 20. Jahrhundert, 87108.
Cologne: Bhlau Verlag, 2000.
Valdivieso, Mercedes. Quiere compartir un estudio conmigo? El estudio
fotogrfico Ringl + Pit y la desmitificacin de la nueva mujer. In Inka
Graeve and Mercedes Valdivieso, Ellen Auerbach. La mirada intuitiva.
Coleccin Archiv der Akademie der Knste de Berln, 2331. Barcelona:
Fundacin la Caixa, 2002.
Foster, David William. Dreaming in Feminine: Grete Sterns Photomontages and
the Parody of Psychoanalysis. Ciberletras: Revista de crtica literaria y de
cultura 10 (2003): http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v10/foster.htm.
Sibbald, K. M. Through a Glass Darkly: Techniques of Feminist Irony in
Grete Sterns Sueos. Hispanic Journal 26, nos. 12 (2005): 24358.
Rexer, Lyle. Grete in Dreamland: The Photomontages of Grete Stern.
Aperture 187 (Summer 2007): 6067.
Fortuny, Natalia. Las representaciones de lo cmico en dos casos de la
fotografa argentina del siglo XX: Grete Stern y Marcos Lpez. Paper presented at the Cuartas Jornadas de Jvenes Investigadores at the Instituto
de Investigaciones Gino Germani, Buenos Aires, September 2007: http://
www.aacademica.com/000-024/75.
Wechsler, Diana B. El exilio antifascista. Clment Moreau y Grete Stern.
Indice. Revista de Ciencias Sociales (Buenos Aires) 37, no. 25 (2007):
187200.
Hopfengrtner, Johanna. Pioneras de la modernidad: Grete Stern y Marie
Langer en Argentina. Iberoamericana (Madrid) 9, no. 33 (2009):
15770.
Perazzo, Nelly. Grete Stern and Photography in Argentina. Art Nexus 9,
no. 76 (MarchMay 2010): 6065.
Soria, Claudia. Grete Stern: Imgenes del goce femenino. Mora (Buenos
Aires) 16 (July 2010): 3448.
Astutti, Adriana. Grete Stern: mujeres soadas. Badebec: Revista del

Centro de Estudios de teora y crtica literaria (Rosario, Argentina) 1, no.
2 (March 2011): 124.
Lotito, Ignacio. Grete Stern. Sueos de Vanguardia. Paper presented at
the symposium Jornada la orientacin Lacaniana at the Centro Descartes,
Buenos Aires, March 19, 2011: http://www.descartes.org.ar/jor2011lotito.htm.
Verlichak, Victoria. Grete Stern. Art Nexus 10, no. 82 (September
November 2011): 13132.
Valdivieso, Mercedes. Von Berlin nach Amerika. Die Fotografinnen Grete
Stern und Ellen Auerbach im Exil. In Inge Hansen-Schaberg, Wolfgang
Thner, and Adriane Feustel, eds., Entfernt. Frauen des Bauhauses
whrend der NS-Zeit Verfolgung und Exil, 21229. Munich: edition
text + kritik, 2012.
Marcoci, Roxana. Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach, Ringlpitis. The
PhotoBook Review (Aperture Foundation) 6 (Spring 2014): 9.
Documentaries
Stern, Grete, interview with Antonia Lerch [1992]. Drei Fotografinnen, Drei
Filmportrts von Antonia Lerch: Ilse Bing, Grete Stern, Ellen Auerbach.
DVD. Directed by Antonia Lerch. Berlin: Absolut Medien, 2007.
Transcribed in part in the pamphlet Drei Fotografinnen, Drei Filmportrts
von Antonia Lerch: Ilse Bing, Grete Stern, Ellen Auerbach. Berlin: Absolut
Medien, 2007.
Ringl and Pit. DVD. Directed by Juan Mandelbaum. Watertown, Mass.:
GEOVISION, 1995.
Coke, Van Deren, and Diana C. du Pont. Photography, a Facet of
Modernism: Photographs from the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art. New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, 1986.
Hambourg, Maria Morris, and Christopher Phillips. The New Vision:
Photography Between the World Wars. The Ford Motor Company
Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by H. N. Abrams, 1989.
Watriss, Wendy, and Lois Parkinson Zamora, eds. Image and Memory:
Photography from Latin America 18661994. Austin: University of Texas
Press, published in association with FotoFest, Inc., 1994.
Lahs-Gonzalez, Olivia. Photography in Modern Europe. Bulletin (Saint Louis
Art Museum), New Series 21, no. 4 (Spring 1996): 4851.
Savedoff, Barbara E. Transforming Images: How Photography Complicates
the Picture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.
Blessing, Jennifer, Kirsten A. Hoving, and Ralph Rugoff. Speaking with
Hands: Photographs from The Buhl Collection. New York: Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, 2004.
Pozzi-Harris, Ana Jorgelina. Marginal Disruptions: Concrete and Mad Art in
Argentina, 19501955. PhD Diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2007.
Witkovsky, Matthew. Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 19181945.
Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2007.
Mller, Ulrike. Bauhaus Women: Art, Handicraft, Design. Paris: Flammarion,
2009.
Fineman, Mia. Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop. New
York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by Yale University
Press, 2012.
246
Ruhe-Strung Streifzge durch die Welten der Collage. Disturbing the Piece: An
Expedition Through the World of Collages. Bnen, Germany: Kettler, 2013.
HORACIO COPPOLA
Publications by or with Collaboration of the Artist
Borges, Jorge Luis. Evaristo Carriego. Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer, 1930.
Coppola, Horacio. Barradas. Clave de Sol (Buenos Aires) 1 (1930):
3233.
. Superacin de la polmica. Clave de Sol (Buenos Aires) 1
(1930): 58.
. Siete Temas. Buenos Aires. Sur (Buenos Aires) 4 (Spring 1931):
n.p., inserts.
. Sobre cine. De la expresin. El cine Americano. Clave de Sol
(Buenos Aires) 2 (1931): 723.
. [Five photos]. Sur (Buenos Aires) 5 (Summer 1932): n.p., inserts.
Zervos, Christian. Lart de la Msopotamie de la fin du quatrime millnaire au
XVe sicle avant notre re: Elam, Sumer, Akkad. Paris: Cahiers dArt, 1935.
Coppola, Horacio. Della fotografia. Campo Grafico (Milan) 5, no. 3
(March 1937): 811.
Marechal, Leopoldo. Historia de la Calle Corrientes. Buenos Aires:
Municipalidad de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1937.
Korn, Guillermo, ed. La Plata a su fundador. La Plata: Edicin de la
Municipalidad, 1939.
Coppola, Horacio. Clment Moreau. Correo Literario (Buenos Aires),
December 15, 1943: 5.
Buschiazzo, Mario Jos. La catedral de Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires:
Ediciones artsticas argentinas, 1943.
Coppola, Horacio. Sinopsis para un film. Que Viva Mxico por S. M.
Eisenstein y G. A. Alexandroff. Latitud (Buenos Aires) 1, no. 1 (February
1945): 1415; no. 2 (March 1945): 17; no. 3 (April 1945): 23; no. 4
(May 1945): 23.
Falcini, Luis. El redescubrimiento del Sarmiento de Rodin. Latitud (Buenos
Aires) 1, no. 1 (February 1945): 89.
Coppola, Horacio. Un retrato, cuatro notas y unas declaraciones de Ren
Clair. Latitud (Buenos Aires) 1, no. 2 (March 1945): 1516.
. La Fotografa para Horacio Coppola. Ver y Estimar (Buenos Aires)
2, no. 10 (October 1955): 13.
. Esculturas de Antonio Francisco Lisboa: O Aleijadinho, 17381814.
Poems by Lorenzo Varela. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Llanura, 1955.
. De fotografa. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Llanura, 1980.
Giacobbe, Juan Francisco, and Horacio Coppola. Viejo Buenos Aires, adis.
Buenos Aires: Sociedad Central de Arquitectos, 1980.
Coppola, Horacio. Imagema. Antologa fotogrfica 19271994. Buenos
Aires: Fondo Nacional de las ArtesEdiciones de la Llanura, 1994.
. Horacio Coppola: Testimonios. Punto de Vista (Buenos Aires) 53
(November 1995): 2025.
Coppola, Horacio, Facundo de Zuvira, and Adrin Gorelik. Buenos Aires
[Coppola + Zuvira]. Bueno Aires: Ediciones Larivire, 2012.
Scho, Ernesto. Horacio Coppola. Antologa fotogrfica 19271992.

Buenos Aires: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1992.
Monz, Josep Vicent, ed. El Buenos Aires de Horacio Coppola. Valencia:
IVAM, Centre Julio Gonzlez, 1996.
Hopkinson, Amanda. Horacio Coppola. London: Guiding Light and Michael
Hoppen Gallery, 2001.
Horacio Coppola de la Bauhaus a Buenos Aires. Madrid: Galera Guillermo
Osma, 2004.
Horacio Coppola: Buenos Aires, aos treinta. Buenos Aires: Galera Jorge
Mara-La Ruche, 2005.
Horacio Coppola: Vises de Buenos Aires. So Paolo: Instituto Moreira
Salles, 2007.
Schwartz, Jorge, et al. Horacio Coppola. Fotografa. Madrid: Fundacin
Telefnica, 2008.
Priamo, Luis, et al. Horacio Coppola: Los Viajes. Buenos Aires: Crculo de
Bellas Artes, 2009.
Migliaccio, Luciano. Luz, cedro e pedra: esculturas de Aleijadinho fotografadas em Minas Gerais, 1945. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Moreira Salles, 2012.
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Solo Exhibition Catalogues and Books
Guttero, Juan Jos. Coppola. Pintores Argentinos del Siglo XX, no. 4. Serie
Complementaria: Fotgrafos Argentinos del Siglo XX, no. 4. Buenos Aires:
Centro Editor de Amrica Latina, 1982.
De Torre, Guillermo. Nueva visin del mundo. La fotografa animista.

Gaceta de Arte (Tenerife, Spain) 3, no. 24 (March 1934): 12.
Moore, Henry. Mesopotamian Art. The Listener (London), June 5, 1935:
94446.
Ocampo, Victoria. Qu hara Ud. si fuera presidente por 24 horas? La
Razn (Buenos Aires), October 23, 1935: 5.
Il Campista. Sfogliando un libro. Campo Grafico. Rivista di estetica e di
tecnica grafica (Milan) 5, no. 1 (January 1937): 67.
Notas y comentarios: Exposicin de fotografas de Horacio Coppola.
Galera Krayd, Bs. Aires, 19 agosto 1955. Nueva Visin. Revista de
cultura visual (Buenos Aires) 7 (1955): 48.
Gorelik, Adrin. Imgenes para una fundacin mitolgica. Apuntes sobre
las fotografas de Horacio Coppola. Punto de Vista (Buenos Aires) 53
(November 1995): 2025.
Bonet, Juan Manuel. Ciudades, Libros, Fotografas. Arte y Parte (Madrid) 3
(JuneJuly 1996): 6476.
Honickel, Thomas. Der Fotograf Horacio Coppola. Stadt, ich lausche deimen Herzen. Photonews (Hamburg) 2 (2004): 20.
Jimnez, Carlos. Horacio Coppola. Lpiz Revista Internacional de Arte
(Madrid) 23, no. 205 (2004): 82.
Priamo, Luis. Obsequio a Horacio. In Horacio Coppola y su hermano y
maestro Armando Coppola (18861957). Exhibition pamphlet. Buenos
Aires: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, August 2006.
Rossi, Cristina. Confluencia de intereses. La galera KRAYD como
punto de encuentro. Paper presented at the IV Jornadas sobre Arte y
Arquitectura en Argentina at the Saln Dorado de la Legislatura de la
Provincia de Buenos Aires, September 79, 2006: http://jornadasfba.
com.ar/Materiales/2006-Jornadas%20IHA/IV%20Jornadas%20de%20
Investigacion/PDF/22_Confluencias%20de%20intereses.pdf.
Grinstein, Eva. Horacio Coppola. Art Nexus 6, no. 63 (JanuaryMarch
2007): 140.
Verlichak, Victoria. Horacio Coppola. Art Nexus 9, no. 76 (MarchMay
2010): 9394.
Ruiz de Samaniego, Alberto. Horacio Coppola: los aos europeos de
formacin. Arte y Parte (Madrid) 89 (OctoberNovember 2010): 5871.
Schwartz, Jorge. Horacio Coppola, entre Manuel Bandeira y el
247
Aleijadinho. Hispamrica 39, no. 115 (2010): 71.

Kefala, Eleni. Borges and Nationalism: Urban Myth and Nation-Dreaming
in the 1920s. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 17, no. 1
(April 2011): 3358.
Foster, David William. Horacio Coppola: The Photographers Urban
Fervor. Hispanic Issues 38 (2011): 13754.
Tabarovsky, Damin. El caminante inmvil. Horacio Coppola y el viaje
vanguardista. Minerva (Madrid) 16 (2011): 1015.
Meister, Sarah Hermanson. Horacio Coppola. Aperture 213 (Winter
2013): 11621.
Alexander, Abel, Patricia Mndez, and Ramn Gutirrez. Fotografa
Latinoamericana Coleccin Cedodal. Buenos Aires: Cedodal, 2001.
Travnik, Juan, and Julio Fuks. Grandes Maestros de la Fotografa Argentina.
Sentimiento de imagen. Buenos Aires: Estudio Heinrich Sanguinetti, 2006.
INDEX
A
Abbott, Berenice, 117
Herald Square, 34th and Broadway, Manhattan, 129, 129
Acosta, Wladimiro, 30, 132
Albers, Josef, 23
Untitled (Shop-window mannequins), 124, 124
Alvajar, Amparo, 30, 84
lvarez Bravo, Manuel, 117
Laughing Mannequins, 125, 125
ngeles Ortiz, Manuel, 30, 87
Anzotegui, Ignacio, 131
Aparicio, Francisco de, 33
Arden Quin, Carmelo, 31
Arndt, Gertrud, 23
Atget, Eugne, 125
Atget: Photographe de Paris, 12930
Auerbach, Ellen (Rosenberg), 2327, 39, 41, 43, 125, 126
Gretchen hat Ausgang (Gretchen Has a Break), 24
Auerbach, Walter, 2324, 41, 43, 126
B
Bayer, Herbert, 25
Research in the development of Universal Type, 25, 26
Bayley, Edgar, 31
Benjamin, Walter, 26
Berni, Antonio, 30, 80
Bing, Ilse, 26, 117
Blossfeldt, Karl, 217
Bonet, Antoni, 33
Borges, Jorge Luis, 30, 31, 81, 118, 119, 120, 122, 129, 214
Brecht, Bertolt, 2729, 65
Stills from footage of Helene Weigel applying makeup, 28, 29
Butelman, Enrique, 34
C
Campo Grafico, 30, 132, 218, 220, 221, 227, 23637, 239
Carriego, Evaristo, 118
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 117, 125
Cassirer, Bruno, 25
Castillo, Ramn, 223
Chale, Gertrudis, 30, 80
Clair, Ren, 125, 132
Clasing, Heinrich (Heinz), 25, 47
Coppola, Armando, 119
Coppola, Horacio, 23, 2930, 42, 11732, 21328
and Imprenta Lpez, 227
and Stern advertising studio, 222, 223
Coppola, Horacio, works by, 34, 6, 9, 11, 13, 134211
ngulo de escalera (Corner of a Staircase), 12021, 121
Ardche, 171, Pl. 153
Artists Statement, with Stern, 236
As Naci el Obelisco (The Birth of the Obelisk), 126-27, stills, 176-77, Pl. 157
Avenida Corrientes con obelisco (Avenida Corrientes with Obelisk), 198, Pl. 182
Avenida Corrientes desde Avenida Alem hacia el oeste (Avenida Corrientes from
248
Avenida Alem towards the West ), 194, Pl. 177

Avenida Corrientes desde el obelisco (Avenida Corientes from the Obelisk), 184,
Pl. 165
Avenida Corrientes hacia el oeste (Avenida Corrientes towards the West), 199, Pl. 183
Avenida de Mayo, 195, Pl. 178
Avenida Daz Vlez al 4800 (4800 Avenida Daz Vlez), 116 (detail), 124, 197,
Pl. 180
Avenida Leandro N. Alem., 4, Pl. 3, 16
Avenida Presidente Roque Senz Pea. Diagonal Norte, 202, Pl. 187
Avenida Presidente Roque Senz Pea y Suipacha (Avenida Presidente Roque
Senz Pea and Suipacha), 205, Pl. 192
Balneario Municipal, 206, Pl. 193
Bartolom Mitre y Montevideo (Bartolom Mitre and Montevideo), 190, Pl. 172
Buenos Aires, 136, Pl. 110
Buenos Aires: Visin Fotogrfico por Horacio Coppola (Buenos Aires: Photographic
Vision by Horacio Coppola), 128, 12931; second edition: 30, 130, 218, 219,
22122
Bulnes entre Sarmiento y Cangallo (Bulnes between Sarmiento and Cangallo), 142,
Pl. 119
Calle Bernardo de Irigoyen al 300 (300 Calle Bernardo de Irigoyen), 196, Pl. 179
Calle California. Vuelta de Rocha. La Boca, 137, Pl. 112
Calle Corrientes, 182, Pl. 162
Calle Corrientes al 3100 (3100 Calle Corrientes), 186, Pl. 167
Calle Corrientes desde el obelisco hacio el oeste (Calle Corrientes from the Obelisk
towards the West ), 185, Pl. 166
Calle Corrientes esquina Reconquista (Calle Corrientes at the Corner of
Reconquista), 203, Pl. 188
Calle Florida, 181, Pl. 161, 200, Pl. 185
Calle Florida a las 20 horas (Calle Florida at 8 p.m.), 203, Pl. 189
Calle Loreto, esquina Avenida Luis Mara Campos, Belgrano, (Calle Loreto, at the
Corner of Avenida Luis Mara Campos, Belgrano), 209, Pl. 197
Calle San Martn al 500 (500 Calle San Martn), 187, Pl. 169
Calle San Martn a las 24 horas (Calle San Martn at Midnight ), 179, Pl. 158
Calle Suipacha, esquina Diagonal Norte, Avenida Presidente Roque Senz Pea
(Calle Suipacha at the Corner of Diagonal Norte, Avenida Presidente Roque
Senz Pea), 183, Pl. 163
Conventillo porteo (Buenos Aires Tenement House), with Stern, 224, 225
Cornucopia, Berlin, 148, Pl. 126
Corrientes al 3000 (3000 Calle Corrientes), 11, Pl. 10, 16, 143, Pl. 121
Der Traum (The Dream), 24, still, 24, 126, stills, 173, Pl. 154
Directorio y Jos Maria Moreno (Directorio and Jos Maria Moreno), 209, Pl. 196
El Coloso. Avenida Corrientes, 198, Pl. 181
Esculturas de Antonio Francisco Lisboa: O Aleijadinho (Sculptures by Antonio
Francisco Lisboa [or] The Little Cripple), 132, 132
Esquina en las antiguas orillas, Calle Paraguay al 2600 (Corner in the Old
Outskirts of the City, 2600 Calle Paraguay), 120, 120
Estacin Retiro (Retiro Station), 6, Pl. 5, 16, 208, Pl. 195
!Esto es Buenos Aires! (This Is Buenos Aires!) [Jorge Luis Borges], 124, 138,
Pl. 113
Estudio (Bauhaus Study)/book, 147, Pl. 125
Estudio (Bauhaus Study)/doll, 124, 146, Pl. 123
Florida frente a la entrada de Galeras Pacifico (Calle Florida at the Entrance of
Galeras Pacifico), 201, Pl. 186
Florida y Sarmiento (Florida and Sarmiento), 183, Pl. 164
Grete Stern, 150, Pl. 129
Hipdromo Argentino. Palermo (Argentine Racecourse. Palermo), 204, Pl. 190
Hipdromo de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires Racecourse), 204, Pl. 191
Hombre lustrandose los zapatos (Man Shining Shoes), 180, Pl. 159
Huacos, cultura chancay, with Stern, 227, 228
Hyde Park, London, 155, Pl. 134
Japanische Blume, Bauhaus, Berlin (Japanese Flower, Bauhaus, Berlin), 124, 147,
Pl. 124
La Plata a su fundador (Korn, ed.), 131, 131

Lima y Belgrano (Lima and Belgrano), 186, Pl. 168
London, photographs of, 13, Pl. 12, 16, 125, 15269, Pls. 13151
London - Gossips, 125, 161, Pl. 140
Mataderos, Londres (Slaughterhouses, London), 159, Pl. 138
Medianeras con aire-luz (Wall with Airshaft ), 143, Pl. 120
Miseria de Buenos Aires (Poverty in Buenos Aires), with Stern, 224, 225
Nocturno (Night Scene), 191, Pl. 173
Nocturno. Avenida Costanera (Night Scene. Avenida Costanera), 193, Pl. 175
Nocturno. Calle Corrientes al 3000 (Night Scene. 3000 Calle Corrientes), 194,
Pl. 176
Nocturno. Cinematgrafo (Night Scene. Movie Theater), 189, Pl. 171, 192, Pl. 174
Notebook of 35mm contact prints from 1931, 122, 122
On Film and Its Expression: American Film, 12021, 23435
On Photography, 132, 23640
Overcoming the Polemic, 120, 23031
Plaza San Martn desde Kavanagh (Plaza San Martn from Kavanagh), 9, Pl. 8, 16
Potsdam, 150, Pl. 128
Prague, 149, Pl. 127
Prisma de cristal (Glass Prism), 119, 134, Pl. 108
Puente Almirante Brown. Riachuelo, 210, Pl. 198
Puerto (Port), 139, Pl. 114
Puerto Vuelta de Rocha. La Boca, 139, Pl. 115
Riesengebirge, 170, Pl. 152
Rivadavia entre Salguero y Medrano (Rivadavia between Salguero and Medrano),
137, Pl. 111
Self-Portrait, 117, 118
Siete temas: Buenos Aires (Seven Themes: Buenos Aires), 122, 123, 124
Still Life with Egg and Twine, 124, 145, Pl. 122
A Sunday on Hampstead Heath, 126, stills, 175, Pl. 156
3060 Calle Corrientes, 140, Pl. 116
Transparencas (Transparencies), 119, 134, Pl. 107
Una esquina, despus de pasar una manifestacin (A Corner, after a
Demonstration), 207, Pl. 194
Un Muelle del Sena (A Quai on the Seine), 126, stills, 174, Pl. 155
Untitled (Angulo de escalera) (Corner of a Staircase), 135, Pl. 109
Untitled (Buenos Aires), 142, Pl. 118, 199, Pl. 184
Untitled (Entrada al 440) (Entrance to 440), 141, Pl. 117
Untitled (Staircase at Calle Corrientes), 3, Pl. 2, 16
Untitled (Torso), 151, Pl. 130
Viamonte y Reconquista (Viamonte and Reconquista), 188, Pl. 170
Vidriera (Shop Window), 180, Pl. 160
Vista de ciudad con transatlntico (City View with an Ocean Liner), 211, Pl. 199
Coppola, Horacio, and Leopoldo Marechal, Historia de la Calle Corrientes (History
of Calle Corrientes), 130, 131
Correo fotografico sudamericano (South American Photographic Post ), 216, 216
Croce, Benedetto, 119
Cuadrado, Arturo, 223, 228
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Film und Foto (Film and Photo), or Fifo, 22, 22
Frank, Waldo, 121
Freud, Sigmund, 34
Freund, Gisle, 26
Fried, Michael, 27
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Germani, Gino, 34
Giusti, Roberto, 119
Grff, Werner, Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (Here Comes the New Photographer!),
22, 22
Gropius, Walter, 23
Guttero, Alfredo, 122
H
Hartlaub, Gustav, 21
Heimann, Paula, 27, 29, 67
Heinrich, Annemarie, 217
Caprices, Anita Grimm, 218
Henri, Florence, 24, 125
Selbsportrait (Self-Portrait), 31, 31
Hermelo, Mony, 30, 88
Hch, Hannah, 2425
Deutsches Mdchen (German Girl ), 25
I
Imprenta Lpez, Cmo se imprime un libro (How a Book Is Printed ), 226, 227
J
Jacobi, Lotte, 24
Jones, Ernest, 29
Justo, Agustn, 223
K
Krtesz, Andr, 125
Klappenbach, Horacio Ral, and Grete Stern, Buenos Aires, 3334, 34
Klein, Melanie, 29
Korn, Guillermo, 131, 224
Korsch, Karl, 27, 28, 66
Kosice, Gyula, 31, 32, 82
Kracauer, Siegfried, 24
Krull, Germaine, 117, 127
Untitled, 119, 119
Kuhr, Fritz, 23
Kurchan, Juan, 33
Dehio, Georg, 124

DellOro Maini, Atilio, 128
Denia, Alberto, Grete Stern, 227, 227
Laa, Diyi, 32, 83

Langer, Marie, 32, 34, 86
Le Corbusier, 33, 122, 128
Leni, Paul, 120
Len, Ana Mara, 34
Eckstein, Claire, 24, 54, 55

Eisenstein, Sergei, 120, 132
Evans, Walker, 117, 129
Maar, Dora, 125

Maiztegui, Isidro, 85, 120
Man Ray, 117, 119, 120, 125, 129
Marcus, Elli, 24
Marechal, Leopoldo, 131
Meyer, Hannes, 23
Minetti, Bernhard, 24, 46
Facio, Sara, 30
Ferrari Hardoy, Guillermo, 34
249
Mir, Joan, 125

Moholy, Lucia, 21
Moholy-Nagy, Lszl, 2123, 117, 119, 124, 125, 127, 129, 221
Moore, Henry, 125
Moreau, Clment, 30, 89, 223, 227, 228
O Aleijadinho (The Little Cripple), 132

Ocampo, Victoria, 29, 31, 118, 120, 122, 128, 129, 213
Ortiz, Roberto Mara, 223
Zigaretten Garbaty (Garbaty Cigarettes), 12, Pl. 11, 16

Zigaretten Gldenring (Gldenring Cigarettes), 26, 60, Pl. 39
Roh, Franz, 117, 121, 122, 132
Roh, Franz, and Jan Tschichold, Foto-Auge (Photo-Eye), 22, 22
Romero, Fancisco, 122
Romero, Jos Luis, 88, 120
Romero Brest, Jorge, 2930, 120, 128, 132, 213, 214, 224, 228
Rossi, Attilio, 132, 218, 228
and design for Coppolas Buenos Aires, 30, 218, 219, 22122
Rothfuss, Rhod, 31
Ruttmann, Walter, Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grostadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great
City), 127, stills, 127
Pern, Juan Domingo, 31

Peterhans, Walter, 21, 23, 40, 124, 125, 214
Andor Weininger, Berlin, 25, 26
Fenier alter Herr (Portrait of a Man), 23
Pichon-Rivire, Enrique, 31, 34
Prebisch, Alberto, 31, 32, 131
Priamo, Luis, 28
Primer Saln Internacional de Arte Fotogrfico (First International Salon of
Photographic Art ), 21617, 216
Saderman, Anatole, 217

Manihot Grahamii/Hardy Tapioca, Fruits and Leaves, 217
Sander, August, 27
High School Student, 27
Schalcher, Traugott, Camera Studies: Ringl + Pit, 23233, 23233
Schmidt, Joost, 23
Seoane, Luis, 30, 223, 228
Servetti Reeves, Jorge, 21617
Sheeler, Charles, 117, 127
Solar, Xul, 31, 122
Spilimbergo, Lino Eneas, 30, 84
Stern, Grete, 2136, 12426, 128, 13032, 150, 21328
and Coppola advertising studio, 222, 223
and ringl + pit, see ringl + pit
Stern, Grete, works by, 7, 8, 10, 38115
Advertisement for Bostanjoglo No. 7, Russian Cigarettes, 72, Pl. 53
Advertisement for Sharp, Perrin & Co. Ltd., 73, Pl. 55
Amparo Alvajar, 30, 84, Pl. 65
Antonio Berni, 30, 80, Pl. 61
Artists Statement, with Coppola, 236
Autorretrato (Self-Portrait), 31, 78, Pl. 58, 79, Pl. 59
Autorretrato con flor (Self-Portrait with Flower), 31, 77, Pl. 57
Bertolt Brecht, 27, 28, 65, Pl. 46
Brochure for Estudio del Plan de Buenos Aires plan for Bajo Belgrano
neighborhood, 33, 33
Brochure for exhibition El Movimiento de Arte Concreto Invencin (The Movement of
Concrete Art Invention), 31, 32
Buenos Aires, with Klappenbach, 3334, 34
Campo Grafico, 90, Pl. 76
Clment Moreau, 30, 89, Pl. 74, 227
Composicin para un libro de varios tipos (Composition for a Book of Several
Types), 7, Pl. 6, 16
Cover design for Campo Grafico 5, no. 3 (March 1937), 218, 220, 221
Cover design for Coppolas Buenos Aires, second edition, 218, 219, 22122
Cover for Kunst und Knstler (Art and Artist), 69, Pl. 49
in Denia, Grete Stern, 227, 227
Diyi Laa, 32, 83, Pl. 64
D.L.H., 70, Pl. 50
Dr. Marie Langer, 32, 86, Pl. 70
Dr. Paula Heimann, 27, 29, 67, Pl. 48
Gertrudis Chale, 30, 80, Pl. 60
Gyula Kosice, 32, 82, Pl. 63
H33, 25, 72, Pl. 52
Helene Weigel, 27, 2829, 64, Pl. 45
Horacio Coppola, 42, Pl. 17
Huacos, cultura chancay, with Coppola, 227, 228
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Neruda, Pablo, 30, 86
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Rascovsky, Arnaldo, 34
Renger-Patzsch, Albert, 21
ringl + pit, 23, 2427, 36, 125, 214, 23233, 232, 233
ringl + pit, works by:
Berlin, 62, Pl. 41
Berliner Strassenfotograf (Berlin Street Photographer), 63, Pl. 44
Bernhard Minetti, 24, 46, Pl. 22
Claire Eckstein, Reversed, 25, 55, Pl. 33
Claire Eckstein mit Lippenstift (Claire Eckstein with Lipstick), 25, 54, Pl. 32
Das Ei des Columbus (Columbuss Egg), 23, 56, Pl. 34
Das Korsett (The Corset ), 25, 61, Pl. 40
Das Raucher (The Smoker), 43, Pl. 18
Das Tnzerpaar, Eckstein & Denby (The Dancing Pair, Eckstein & Denby), 24, 24
Dents, 50, Pl. 28
Ellen Auerbach, 24, 39, Pl. 14
Ernst, 63, Pl. 43
Fragment einer Braut (Fragment of a Bride), 26, 49, Pl. 27
Goggi, 45, Pl. 21
Handschuh (Glove), 48, Pl. 25
Heliocitin, 26, 73, Pl. 54
Hut und Handschuhe (Hat and Gloves), 26, 52, Pl. 30
Kahlkopf (Bald Head ) [Heinrich Clasing], 25, 47, Pl. 24
Komol, 26, 51, Pl. 29, 214, 214
Kpfe (Heads), 48, Pl. 26
Leinen (Linen), 5, Pl. 4, 16, 23
Maratti. Kunstseide (Maratti. Artificial Silk), 26, 57, Pl. 35
Ptrole Hahn, 25, 53, Pl. 31
pit mit Schleier (pit with Veil ), 2, Pl. 1, 16
ringl in Tub, 59, Pl. 38
ringl mit Brille (ringl with Glasses) 24, 38, Pl. 13
Ringlpitis, 24, 74-75, Pl. 56
Rotbart (Red Beard), 58, Pl. 36
Seifenlauge (Soapsuds), 26, 58, Pl. 37
Untitled, 46, Pl. 23, 62, Pl. 42
Walter and Ellen Auerbach, 41, Pl. 16
Walter and Ellen Auerbach, London, 43, Pl. 19
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Invitation to exhibition Fotos: H. Coppola y G. Stern (Photos: H. Coppola and G.

Stern), 212, 21415
Isidro Maiztegui, 85, Pl. 67
Jorge Luis Borges, 30, 81, Pl. 62
Jos Luis Romero, 88, Pl. 73
Karl Korsch, 27, 28, 66, Pl. 47
Letra A (Letter A), 90, Pl. 75
Lino Eneas Spilimbergo, 30, 84, Pl. 66
Manuel ngeles Ortiz, 30, 87, Pl. 71
Margarita Guerrero, 10, Pl. 9, 16
Mara Elena Walsh, 31, 85, Pl. 68
MER Fahrplan (MER Schedule), 71, Pl. 51
Mony Hermelo, 30, 88, Pl. 72
Notes on Photomontage, 24143
Pablo Neruda, 30, 86, Pl. 69
Photomontage for Mad, Ramos Meja, Argentina, 32, 91, Pl. 77
Photomontages, El psicoanlisis le ayudar (Psychoanalysis Will Help You),
3436, 35
Sueo No. 1: Artculos elctricos para el hogar (Dream No. 1: Electrical
Appliances for the Home), 36, 93, Pl. 78
Sueo No. 2: En el andn (Dream No. 2: On the Platform), 94, Pl. 80
Sueo No. 3: Sin ttulo (Dream No. 3: Untitled), 94, Pl. 80
Sueo No. 4: Sirena de agua dulce (Dream No. 4: Freshwater Mermaid), 95, Pl. 81
Sueo No. 5: Botella del mar (Dream No. 5: Bottle from the Sea), 96, Pl. 82
Sueo No. 6: Sin ttulo (Dream No. 6: Untitled ), 36, 96, Pl. 83
Sueo No. 7: Quin ser? (Dream No. 7: Who Will She Be?), 8, Pl. 7, 16
Sueo No. 8: Hemisferios (Dream No. 8: Hemispheres), 97, Pl. 84
Sueo No. 10: Cuerpos celestes (Dream No. 10: Celestial Bodies), 97, Pl. 85
Sueo No. 11: Flor nio (Dream No. 11: Flower Child ), 99, Pl. 87
Sueo No. 12: Sin ttulo (Dream No. 12: Untitled ), 98, Pl. 86
Sueo No. 13: Consentimiento (Dream No. 13: Consent ), 99, Pl. 88
Sueo No. 14: Angustia (Dream No. 14: Anguish), 100, Pl. 89
Sueo No. 16: Sirena del mar (Dream No. 16: Mermaid ), 101, Pl. 90
Sueo No. 18: Caf Concert (Dream No. 18: Caf Concert ), 102, Pl. 91
Sueo No. 20: Perspectiva (Dream No. 20: Perspective), 103, Pl. 93
Sueo No. 22: ltimo beso (Dream No. 22: Last Kiss), 104, Pl. 94
Sueo No. 24: Sorpresa (Dream No. 24: Surprise), 36, 105, Pl. 95
Sueo No. 25: Barquito de papel (Dream No. 25: Paper Boat), 106, Pl. 96
Sueo No. 26: El ojo eterno (Dream No. 26: The Eternal Eye), 107, Pl. 97
Sueo No. 27: No destie con el agua (Dream No. 27: Does Not Fade with
Water), 20 (detail), 108, Pl. 98
Sueo No. 28: Amor sin ilusin (Dream No. 28: Love without Illusion), 109, Pl. 99
Sueo No. 30: En esta hora (Dream No. 30: At This Time), 110, Pl. 100
Sueo No. 31: Made in England (Dream No. 31: Made in England ), 29, 111,
Pl. 101
Sueo No. 36: Fracturas (Dream No. 36: Fractures), 112, Pl. 102
Sueo No. 44: La acusada (Dream No. 44: The Accused ), 114, Pl. 104
Sueo No. 45: Sin ttulo (Dream No. 45: Untitled ), 36, 115, Pl. 105
Sueo No. 46: Extraamiento (Dream No. 46: Estrangement ), 115, Pl. 106
Sueos (Dreams), 23, 3436
Untitled, 44, Pl. 20
Walter Peterhans, 21, 40, Pl. 15
Stern, Walter, 21
Stieglitz, Alfred, 117
Strand, Paul, 117, 127
Sur, 29, 30, 31, 36, 122, 123, 124, 128, 213, 21314, 218, 224
and Coppola and Sterns exhibition, 212, 21416, 215
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Taiana, Cecilia, 34
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Tell, Vernica, 30
Thiemann, Elsa, 23
U
Ullmann, Bella, 23
Umbehr, Otto (Umbo), 21
Uriburu, Jos Flix, 223
V
Vedia y Mitre, Mariano de, 128
Vertov, Dziga, 120
W
Walsh, Mara Elena, 31, 85
Weigel, Helene, 27, 2829, 28, 64
Williams, Amancio, 33
Witkovsky, Matthew S., 25
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Yrigoyen, Hiplito, 223
Z
Zervos, Christian, 26, 124, 125
Zwart, Piet, 23
Acknowledgments
Roxana Marcoci and Sarah Hermanson Meister
From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio

Coppola, in both its exhibition and book forms, could not have
been possible without the dedicated assistance of countless
individuals committed to bringing to wider recognition the
achievements of these two influential artists whose careers were
born in the interwar avant-garde. Our heartfelt thanks go first
and foremost to Glenn D. Lowry, Director of The Museum of
Modern Art, whose commitment to expanding the narratives of
modern art at the Museum has inspired and motivated this project.
Additional thanks are due to Kathy Halbreich, Associate Director;
Peter Reed, Senior Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs; and
Ramona Bronkar Bannayan, Senior Deputy Director for Exhibitions
and Collections, for their leadership and support throughout this
process. We are also grateful to James Gara, Chief Operating
Officer, and Diana Pulling, Chief of Staff, for their encouragement
and guidance.
The research and travel necessary to realize this project were
only made possible through the support of several initiatives
within the Museum for which we are most grateful, including
The International Council as well as The Modern Womens Fund,
which owing to Sarah Peters spirited and generous advocacy of
the work of women artists has supported countless programs and
exhibitions across the Museum since 2005. The pan-institutional
Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) groups for
Central and Eastern European art and Latin American art were
instrumental in arranging study and conversations at the Museum
surrounding the work of Stern and Coppola. The Latin American
and Caribbean Fund, under the dynamic leadership of Patricia
Phelps de Cisneros, has helped to spur broader institutional interest in the work of both artists and has supported the acquisition
of their works, which constitute highlights of the exhibition and
catalogue. Special thanks are due to Todd Bishop, Senior Deputy
Director, External Affairs; Lauren Stakias, Director of Exhibition
and Program Funding; and Lesley Cannady, Associate Director of
Development, for their tireless efforts in finding additional funding
from outside the Museum.
We must express our deepest gratitude to the generous lenders
to the exhibition (listed on page 18), whose understanding and
252
enthusiasm for the project have been essential. We are honored by the support and collaboration of Carlos Peralta Ramos,
Coppolas stepson, and the estate of Stern and Coppola. By
allowing us access to their archives in Buenos Aires and lending
many works never seen publicly to the Museum for exhibition,
Carlos was invaluable in making this show a reality. Special
recognition is due to other lenders of major bodies of work and
their representatives: Collection Eduardo F. Costantini, Buenos
Aires; Collection Alexis Fabry, Paris; Timothy Potts, Director, the
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Jorge Mara and the Galera
Jorge Mara-La Ruche, Buenos Aires; Jos Miguel Garca Corts,
Director, the Institut Valenci dArt Modern; Manuel Borja-Villel,
Director, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa, Madrid;
Thomas P. Campbell, Director, The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York; Tobia Bezzola, Director, Museum Folkwang, Essen;
Collection Lticia andStanislas Poniatowski; and Nicholas Serota,
Director, Tate, London. The generous loans from these institutions
and individuals have enabled many of the works to be seen in the
United States for the first time. Additional loans from collections
across Europe, Argentina, and the United States have added
further depth and dimension to this presentation of Sterns and
Coppolas careers, and for this we are deeply grateful: Collection
Anna Gamazo de Abell, Madrid; Douglas Druick, Director, Art
Institute of Chicago; Collection Sergio Alberto Baur, Buenos Aires;
Eric Franck Fine Art, London; Galerie Berinson, Berlin; Collection
Jorge Helft and Marion Eppinger, Buenos Aires; Howard
Greenberg Gallery, New York; Collection Helen Kornblum;
Michael Hoppen Gallery, London; Collection Raul Naon, Buenos
Aires; The New York Public Library; Collection Diran Sirinian,
Buenos Aires; and other private collections.
Daniel Magilow, Luis Prez-Oramas, Jeff Rosenheim, Anne Wilkes

Tucker, and Andres Zervign. Our research was informed as
well by productive conversations with experts, art historians, and
artists during our travels to Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Paris. For
taking the time to meet with us both abroad and in New York, we
thank Juan Manuel Bonet, Sergio Burgi, Sara Facio, Ed Grazda,
Sabine Hartmann, Mauro Herlitzka, Luis Priamo, Leandro Villaro,
and Facundo de Zuvira. We thank our translator in Buenos
Aires, Jazmn Adler, who facilitated and enriched many of these
conversations. We extend our gratitude to Juan Mandelbaum,
director of the documentary Ringl and Pit, for his counsel and for
sharing his memories of and interviews with Coppola, Stern, and
Ellen Auerbach.
by several curatorial interns: Aaron Cator, Francisco Chapparo,

JamesLevinsohn, and Juanita Solano.
The high quality of the Museums exhibitions and publications

would not be possible without the tremendous efforts of its staff of
talented professionals, for whom we have the utmost appreciation.
Erik Patton, Associate Director of Exhibitions, and Rachel Kim,
Assistant Coordinator, expertly oversaw the exhibitions organization and logistics and ensured its seamless presentation. Ellen
Conti, Associate Registrar, managed the transport and registration
of works with aplomb and provided expert guidance. We are
incredibly thankful for the careful and dedicated work of Lee Ann
Daffner, Andrew W. Mellon Conservator of Photographs, and
Hanako Murata, Assistant Conservator of Photographs, Thomas
Walther Project, whose skillful treatment of the works enabled
many of the photographs to be shown in the exhibition and reproduced in this catalogue.
Milan Hughston, Chief of Library and Museum Archives, shared

our enthusiasm for the project and, along with David Senior,
Bibliographer, and Jennifer Tobias, Librarian, provided crucial
assistance in our research. Wendy Woon, Deputy Director for
Education, and Pablo Helguera, Director, Adult & Academic
Education, skillfully assisted with public programming. Matthew
Cox, Assistant Production Manager, Exhibition Design and
Production, designed a superb exhibition to showcase the work
of these two artists. Peter Perez, Foreman of the Frame Shop,
expertly oversaw the framing of the works, while Rob Jung,
Manager of Art Handling and Preparation, and his team of
preparators performed a beautiful installation befitting of Sterns
and Coppolas art. Elle Kim, Senior Art Director, and Ingrid
Chou, Associate Creative Director, Department of Graphic
Design and Advertising, designed the exhibitions graceful
signage, advertisements, and graphic identity. In the Department
of Communications, Kim Mitchell, Chief Communication Officer;
Margaret Doyle, Director of Communications; and Sara Beth
Walsh, Communications Manager, were key to bringing this
exhibition to greater public awareness.
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At the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, our exhibition-tour

partner, we appreciate the commitment and collaboration of
Gary Tinterow, Director; Deborah L. Roldn, Assistant Director,
Exhibitions; and Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge, Department
of Photography.
We had the great pleasure of hosting a Scholars Day as a vital

part of this project, and the exhibition and catalogue benefitted
tremendously thanks to the inspired presentations and critical dialogue. We extend our appreciation to all who attended and especially to those who presented: Natalia Brizuela, Ana Maria Len
Crespo, Jorge Francisco Liernur, Elizabeth Otto, Jodi Roberts (who
deserves special mention for her contribution to this catalogue and
for sharing her expertise throughout the project), and Vernica
Tell. For their critical acumen and invaluable support, we would
also like to thank our colleagues Alex Alberro, Simon Baker,
Barry Bergdoll, Malcolm Daniel, Virginia Heckert, Corey Keller,
We offer our heartfelt thanks to the entire Department of

Photography, especially Quentin Bajac, Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz
Chief Curator of Photography; Eva Respini, former Curator of
Photography; and Lucy Gallun, Assistant Curator of Photography,
for their collegial support and suggestions. Marion Tand,
Department Manager, along with Megan Feingold, Department
Coordinator, and Tasha Lutek, Senior Cataloguer, have deftly
managed the complexities of the Museums ongoing acquisition of
works by these two oft-overlooked artists. We are grateful as well to
Maria Morris Hambourg, former Senior Curator; Mitra Abbaspour,
former Associate Curator; and the team for the Thomas Walther
Collection Research Project for sharing their research and resources
with us. Our profuse thanks go to Drew Sawyer, Beaumont and
Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, for his tireless work in planning
and organizing countless details of the exhibition. Rachel Kaplan,
Museum Research Consortium Fellow 201314, provided critical
research and assisted in the translation of texts from Spanish,
including those published here. The exhibition benefited greatly
from the diligent research and administrative assistance provided
253
In the Department of Publications, our thanks begin with Christopher

Hudson, Publisher, and Chul R. Kim, Associate Publisher, for
their adroit leadership. We are indebted beyond measure for the
guidance provided by David Frankel, Editorial Director, and for the
painstaking care taken by Marc Sapir, Production Director, and
Matthew Pimm, Production Manager, to ensure the high quality
of this book throughout its production. Special thanks go to Jason
Best for his editing skills, which are both elegant and scrupulous.
Our deep appreciation for the brilliant design of the book goes to
Joseph Logan and Rachel Hudson.
We owe our deepest and most sincere gratitude to The Modern

Womens Fund at The Museum of Modern Art and The David
Berg Foundation for providing major support for the exhibition.
We are thankful as well for the additional support offered by the
Consulate General of the Argentine Republic in New York and by
the MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund, and by the John Szarkowski
Publication Fund, which made this book possible.
It is our privilege to present the first exhibition in the United States
of these two groundbreaking artists. Their distinctly experimental
styles, seen from the Bauhaus to Buenos Airesand now New
Yorkhave led to their recognition as pioneering visionaries and
founders of modern Latin American photography.
Photo Credits
All works by Grete Stern and

Horacio Coppola are copyright
2015 Estate of Horacio
Coppola. Unless listed below,
photographs of works of art
reproduced in this volume have
been provided by the owners or
custodians, who are identified in
the captions. Individual works of
art appearing in this volume may
be protected by copyright in the
United States or elsewhere and
may not be reproduced without
the permission of the rights holders. In reproducing the images
contained in this publication, The
Museum of Modern Art obtained
the permission of the rights holder
whenever possible. Should the
Museum have been unable to locate a rights holder, notwithstanding good-faith efforts, it requests
that any contact information
concerning such rights holders be
forwarded so that they may be
contacted for future editions.
254
2015 Annemarie Heinrich

Estate, Buenos Aires: p. 218,
fig. 7.
2015 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York: p. 25, fig. 7.
2015 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York, and Image
President and Fellows of Harvard
College; image source: Imaging
Department, Harvard University:
page 26, fig. 9.
2015 Berenice Abbott /
Commerce Graphics: p. 129,
fig. 11.
Photographs by EPW Studio, New
York: pls. 3, 6, 9; p. 34, fig. 15;
p. 35, figs. 16, 17; pls. 16, 46,
49, 52, 5662, 65, 66, 68, 70,
7274, 76, 87; p. 120, fig. 3;
p. 123, fig. 6; p. 130, fig. 12;
p. 131, fig. 13; p. 132, fig. 14;
pls. 107, 108, 113121, 125,
127131, 137140, 143153,
164, 183, 184, 189, 191, 193,
197; p. 219, fig. 8; p. 220, fig.
9; p. 222, fig. 10; p. 226, fig.
12; p. 228, fig. 14.
2015 Estate of Wather
Peterhans, Museum Folkwang,
Essen, Germany; image 2015
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston;
image source: Bridgeman Images:
p. 23, fig. 4.
2015 Florence Henri / Galleria
Martini & Ronchetti, courtesy
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco:
p. 31, fig. 12.
Courtesy J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles; photographer: Ellen
Auerbach: p. 24, fig. 6; pls. 18,
30, 36, 40; photographer: Grete
Stern: pl. 23.
Photograph by Joaquin Cortes:
pl. 84.
Photograph by Jodi Roberts: p.
216, figs. 4, 5; p. 227, fig. 13.
2015 La Nacin; photographer: Jodi Robert: p. 214, fig. 2;
p. 215, fig. 3 (top).
2015 La Prensa: p. 215, fig. 3

(bottom).
Image 2015 The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York; image
source, Art Resource, New York:
pls. 28, 29, 31, 104.
The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, Imaging and Visual
Resources; photographer: Peter
Butler: 2015 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York: p. 22,
fig. 2; photographer: Thomas
Griesel: pls. 77, 121, 125;
photographer: John Wronn: pl.
12; p. 22, fig. 1; p. 26, fig.
8.; 2015 Estate of Walther
Peterhans, Museum Folkwang,
Essen, Germany; 2015 Die
Photographische Sammlung / SK
Stiftung Kultur - August Sander
Archiv, Cologne / ARS, NY: p.
27, fig. 10; pls. 20, 37, 38,
42, 78, 94, 95; 2015 Estate
of Germaine Krull, Museum
Folkwang, Essen, Germany: p.
119, fig. 2; 2015 Estate of
Manuel lvarez Bravo / Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York /
ADAGP, Paris: p. 125, fig. 8; p.
128, fig. 10; pls. 110, 122, 126,
132136, 171, 174, 180;
2015 Anatole Saderman Estate,
Buenos Aires: p. 217, fig. 6; pp.
23233.
Published in conjunction with

the exhibition From Bauhaus to
Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and
Horacio Coppola, at The Museum
of Modern Art, New York
(May 17October 4, 2015),
organized by Roxana Marcoci,
Senior Curator, and Sarah
Hermanson Meister, Curator,
Research and Collections,
Department of Photography
Produced by the Department

of Publications, The Museum of
Christopher Hudson, Publisher
Chul R. Kim, Associate Publisher
David Frankel, Editorial Director
Marc Sapir, Production Director
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The exhibition will travel to the
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in
2016.
Major support for the exhibition

is provided by The Modern
Womens Fund and by The David
Berg Foundation.
Additional funding is provided
by the Consulate General of
the Argentine Republic in New
York and by the MoMA Annual
Exhibition Fund.
Research and travel support was

provided by The International
Council of The Museum of
Modern Art.
Support for this publication is

provided by the John Szarkowski
Publications Fund.
255
Edited by Jason Best

Designed by Joseph Logan and
Rachel Hudson, Joseph Logan
Design, New York
Production by Matthew Pimm
Color separations, printing, and
binding by Brizzolis, S.A., Madrid
The book is typeset in Futura and
Revolution Gothic.
The paper is 150gsm Creator Silk
and 120gsm Acroprint Milk.
Published by The Museum of
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019
2015 The Museum of Modern

Art, New York. All works by Grete
Stern and Horacio Coppola are
2015 Estate of Horacio
Coppola. Copyright credits for
certain illustrations are listed in the
photo credits opposite. All rights
reserved.
Library of Congress Control
Number: 2014957850
ISBN: 978-0-87070-961-6
Distributed in the United States
and Canada by
ARTBOOK | D.A.P.
155 Sixth Avenue, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10013
www.artbook.com
Distributed outside the United
States and Canada by
Thames & Hudson, Ltd.
181 High Holborn
London WC1V 7QX
www.thamesandhudson.com
Printed in Spain
Cover, top:
ringl + pit
Komol. 1931
(35.9 24.4 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York. Ford Motor Company
Collection, Gift of Ford Motor
Company and John C. Waddell
(see plate 29)
Bottom:
Horacio Coppola
Nocturno. Cinematgrafo (Night
Scene. Movie Theater). 1936
Gelatin silver print, 8 316 x 5 1516"
(20.8 x 15.1 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Latin American and
Caribbean Fund
(see plate 174)
Endpapers, front: Horacio
Coppola. Detail plate 127
Back: Grete Stern. Detail plate 59
Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art
David Rockefeller*
Honorary Chairman
Ronald S. Lauder
Honorary Chairman
Robert B. Menschel*
Chairman Emeritus
Wallis Annenberg
Lin Arison**
Sid R. Bass
Lawrence B. Benenson
Leon D. Black
Eli Broad*
Clarissa Alcock Bronfman
Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
Mrs. Jan Cowles**
Douglas S. Cramer*
Paula Crown
Lewis B. Cullman**
David Dechman
Glenn Dubin
Joel S. Ehrenkranz*
John Elkann
Laurence D. Fink
H.R.H. Duke Franz of Bavaria**
Glenn Fuhrman
Kathleen Fuld
Gianluigi Gabetti*
Howard Gardner
Maurice R. Greenberg**
Anne Dias Griffin
Agnes Gund*
Mimi Haas
Ronnie Heyman
Alexandra A. Herzan
Marlene Hess
AC Hudgins
Barbara Jakobson*
Werner H. Kramarsky*
Jill Kraus
Marie-Jose Kravis
June Noble Larkin*
Ronald S. Lauder
Thomas H. Lee
Michael Lynne
Donald B. Marron*
Wynton Marsalis**
Robert B. Menschel*
Philip S. Niarchos
James G. Niven
Peter Norton
Daniel S. Och
Maja Oeri
Richard E. Oldenburg**
Michael S. Ovitz
Ronald O. Perelman
Peter G. Peterson*
Mrs. Milton Petrie**
Emily Rauh Pulitzer*
David Rockefeller*
David Rockefeller, Jr.
Sharon Percy Rockefeller
Lord Rogers of Riverside**
Richard E. Salomon
Marcus Samuelsson
Ted Sann**
Anna Marie Shapiro*
Gilbert Silverman**
Anna Deavere Smith
Jerry I. Speyer
Ricardo Steinbruch
Yoshio Taniguchi**
Eugene V. Thaw**
Jeanne C. Thayer*
Alice M. Tisch
Joan Tisch*
Edgar Wachenheim III*
Gary Winnick
Ex Officio
Glenn D. Lowry
Director
Agnes Gund*
Chairman of the Board
of MoMA PS1
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Agnes Gund*
President Emerita
Donald B. Marron*
President Emeritus
Jerry I. Speyer
Chairman
Marie-Jose Kravis
President
Sid R. Bass
Leon D. Black
Mimi Haas
Richard E. Salomon
Vice Chairmen
Glenn D. Lowry
Director
Richard E. Salomon
Treasurer
James Gara
Assistant Treasurer
Patty Lipshutz
Secretary
Sharon Percy Rockefeller

President of The International
Council
Christopher Lee Apgar and Ann

Schaffer
Co-Chairmen of The
Contemporary Arts Council
Bill de Blasio
Mayor of the City of New York
Scott M. Stringer
Comptroller of the City of
New York
Melissa Mark-Viverito
Speaker of the Council of
the City of New York
*Life Trustee
**Honorary Trustee

From Bauhaus To Buenos Aires. Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola MoMA 2015

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From Bauhaus To Buenos Aires. Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola MoMA 2015

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approach to photography, film, advertising, and graphic design, Grete

artists and intellectuals, they thrived, harbingers of the New Vision in a

Distributed in the United States and Canada by

Distributed outside the United States and Canada by

Coppolas sweeping photographic survey of a Buenos Aires on the cusp of

FROM BAUHAUS TO BUENOS AIRES

Hailed in their own time as artistic revolutionaries for their transformational

From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola

ROXANA MARCOCI and SARAH HERMANSON MEISTER

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

Lenders to the Exhibition

Photographer Against the Grain: Through the Lens of Grete Stern

Grete Stern Plates

Horacio Coppola Plates

Selected Artists Texts and Writings about the Artists

Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art

Lenders to the Exhibition

Estate of Horacio Coppola, Buenos Aires

The Museum of Modern Art is proud to present From Bauhaus

Considering the interdisciplinary works and cosmopolitan

Photographer Against the Grain:

In 1927, Grete Stern, an aspiring twenty-three-year-old

Smith, Limits of the Tactile and the

technical perfectionist versed in mathematics, art history,

Fig 2 Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold. Foto-Auge (Photo-

Eye). 1929. Stuttgart: Verlag F. Wedekind. The Museum

Confederation, Stuttgart). 1929. Offset lithograph, 33 23 18" (84 58.5 cm).

Thus, the Berlin to which Stern relocated was in the

Fig 3 Werner Grff. Es kommt der neue Fotograf!

(Here Comes the New Photographer!). 1929. Berlin:

4 Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Produktion-

5 Originally established in Weimar, the

Reproduktion, De Stijl 5, no. 7 (July

1990), p. 75. 7 Walter Peterhans, Zum

10 Stern received an inheritance from

after arriving in Berlin in October 1932.

gender and other social norms. Ellen and Walter Auerbach,

BERLIN: RINGL + PIT

13 Art historian Mercedes Valdivieso has

also identified Walter Auerbach as a

text+kritik, 2012), p. 216. 14 Women

their artistic personas, simultaneously as authors and models.15

gender definitions and racist and colonialist ideas (fig. 7),

Otto, The Female Madmen of Weimar

17 Maud Lavin, ringl + pit: The

in Central Europe, 19181945

avant-garde journal Der Querschnitt. Their foto-reklamen (a

22 In a 1998 interview, Ellen Auerbach

Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001), p. 59.

featured their work alongside that of Coppola and Peterhans

studio, and in 1933 they joined the exodus of artists and

LONDON: BERTOLT BRECHT, HELENE WEIGEL,

paper, 11 34 23 58" (29.8 x 60 cm). Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum.

In London, Stern worked for two years as an advertising

25 Grete Stern, in the documentary film

Lerch, quoted in Mller, Bauhaus

Paula Heimann (pl. 48) attest to the richness of Sterns milieu

absorption, and facingness since the late

Arbeiterschule (Marxist Workers School) in Berlin, where

30 Luis Priamo, Grete Stern: Obra

(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press,

1929. Akademie der Knste, Berlin. Bertolt Brecht Archiv

thereby converting expression into representation.33 In