Grete Stern

Grete Stern (9 May 1904 – 24 December 1999) was a German-Argentine photographer. Between April 1930 and March 1933, she studied at the Bauhaus. With her husband Horacio Coppola, she helped modernize the visual arts in Argentina, and presented the first exhibition of modern photographic art in Buenos Aires, in 1935.

Early life The daughter of Frida Hochberger and Louis Stern, Grete Stern was born on 9 May 1904 in Elberfeld, Germany. The name ringl+pit is from their childhood nicknames (Ringl for Grete, Pit for Ellen). where Stern set up a new studio, soon to resume her collaboration there with Auerbach. Readers were encouraged to submit their dreams to be analyzed by the 'experts' as an aid for its readers to find "self-knowledge and self-aid that would help them succeed in love, family and work". Each week, one dream would be selected, analyzed in depth by the expert, Richard Rest, and then illustrated by Stern through photomontage. Stern created about 150 of these photomontages, of which only 46 survive in negatives. Stern's photomontages are surreal interpretations of the readers' dreams that often subtly pushed back on the traditional values and concepts in Idilio magazine by inserting feminist critique of Argentinian gender roles and the psychoanalytic project in her images. The Idilio series has often been compared to Francisco Goya's Sueños drawings, a series of preliminary drawings for his later body of work, Los Caprichos; they have also been directly compared to Los Caprichos themselves.

Stern provided photographs for the magazine and served for a stint as a photography teacher in Resistencia at the National University of the Northeast in 1959 and continued to teach until 1985. In 2015 her work was the subject of an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art called "From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horatio Coppola."

Collections Stern's work is held in the following permanent collections:

The Jewish Museum The Museum of Modern Art The Metropolitan Museum The J. Paul Getty Museum