Grete Stern: From the Jewish Feminine Lens

Grete Stern is known for bringing new photographic and aesthetics techniques from the Bauhaus to Argentina. It is also well known that she was Jewish and that she fled Germany because of the rise of Nazism. Biographers have mentioned that she received other refugees from Nazism at her home in Ramos Mejía and that they were often models for her photographs. Major exhibitions have been done over the years, about the series of photomontages published in Idilio between 1948 and 1951, accompanying Gino Germani`s interpretations of the reader`s dreams. In these photomontages the artist uses existing material from her archive, and the female image predominates. Other important works by Grete Stern, also well studied, are those that make the series about the indigenous populations of the Chaco (1958-1964), from a more ethnographic view.

From the selection of certain works by Grete Stern, both the portraits after the arrival in Buenos Aires, the photomontages for Idilio and the Chaco series, it is proposed to study Stern`s work from the perspective of the Jewish woman artist experience. I try to observe to what extent the experience of the artist as refugee of Nazism is expressed in her photographs, and if there are forms or subjects that arise from her experience as a woman and as a German Jewish refugee in Buenos Aires in the immediate postwar period. This research starts from the works themselves and is complemented with archive material, exhibitions and publications about the artist.