A vast survey of the work of Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola, two visual artists credited with establishing photography as a modernist art form in Argentina in the 1930s, has been brought to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. More than 250 black and white photographs, photomontages, graphics, advertisements and experimental 16mm films produced by the avant-garde couple are now on display for the first time, in an exhibition that simultaneously tells the story of great creative energy crossing continents and about an earlier tide of European migration.
Born in Germany, Stern studied in Berlin with Walter Peterhans, who became head of photography at the Bauhaus, before co-founding her own studio in London in 1928. Ringl + pit was recognised for its radical commercial work that questioned stereotypes of femininity but still managed to catch the public imagination.
A world away, Coppola began taking photographs in Buenos Aires in the late 1920s and, like his American contemporary Man Ray and the Hungarian painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy, he began to play with perspective and lighting rather than using his camera simply to record events.
Coppola moved to the Bauhaus in 1932 where he met Stern, but the couple soon fled from Nazi Germany. Stern went back to London and found herself at home in a circle of intellectuals and left-wing activists including Bertolt Brecht, whom she photographed. Coppola travelled through Europe capturing images of a restless continent before settling in the UK capital. The films he produced during that time reveal his enduring interest in the social and material fabric of Berlin, Paris and London.
Newly married, Stern and Coppola moved to Buenos Aires in 1935 where they established a salon for artists and the city’s intelligentsia, many of whom had fled the growing conflagration of Europe. Over the next decade Coppola would continue to capture urban landscapes, photographing ever-changing Buenos Aires, while Stern would photograph a legion of leading figures in the anti-fascist and proto-feminist movement. Still a radical, she drew on her own experiences as a working mother to upend the myth of domesticity. The couple eventually divorced.
• From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola is on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until October 4 (www.moma.org)
