A New Woman’s Exile in Buenos Aires: Grete Stern’s Photomontages between Feminism and Popular Culture

The focus of this article will rely on the work of the photographer Grete Stern, who had to flee Germany in 1933 due to her Jewish background, and later emigrated to Argentina. Special attention will be given to her photomontage series Sueños (Dreams) for the women’s magazine Idilio, which the artist produced between 1948 and 1951, and which played an essential role in the modernization of Argentinean photography. Moreover, today these photomontages are known for having had a fundamental influence on the dissemination of psychoanalysis in Argentina, as well as on feminist art in general. As these photomontages were published together with the psychoanalytic column “El psicoanálisis te ayudará” and negotiated different aspects of psychoanalytic theory, they were often interpreted within the tradition of surrealist photography.[1] In this article, however, I would like to propose an alternative, perhaps complementary reading of these images and embed Stern’s Dreams in a broader context—the context of her experience as an exile in Argentina, the context of the magazine, and the context of Peronist visual culture. As I will argue, this allows these photomontages to be read as multilayered aesthetic, political, and feminist interventions in a time when more and more restrictions dominated artistic practices in Argentina. In the following, I will provide an insight into Stern’s formation and work in Germany, and the ideas of femininity that influenced her art before and after emigration. After that, I will discuss the politically enforced changes in the field of Argentinean visual culture. And finally, I will analyze Stern’s photomontages in the context of the magazine and their impact beyond, on the modernization of photography in Argentina.