Grete Stern

Sueño nº 41: Llamada; De la serie "Sueños". Fotomontaje para la sección "El psicoanálisis te ayudará" de "Idilio. Revista Juvenil y femenina", n. º 26, 17/5/1949, Buenos Aires

(Dream No. 41: Call, from the series Dreams)

Grete Stern (Elberfeld, Germany, 1904 – Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1999) studied graphic design at the Württembergische Kunstgewerbeschule (Württemberg Arts and Crafts School) in Stuttgart between 1923 and 1925, coinciding with a boom in printed media and the appearance of new languages and ways of understanding advertising, in which photography and reproduction occupied an important place. It was in this field that she pursued her career as an artist, achieving international recognition of her remarkable use of the possibilities of the medium of photography. She became involved in the world of advertising in Berlin and studied photography with Walter Peterhans, first in 1927/1928 and then in 1932, attending classes that he gave as director of the photography department at the Bauhaus in Dessau. In 1929, she and Ellen Auerbach founded a graphic design and photography studio, ringl pit, producing photographic images that featured technical, physical and iconographic experimentation. In 1933, when the National Socialist Party came to power, she emigrated to England and continued her professional activity. She married the photographer Horacio Coppola and they settled definitively in Buenos Aires in 1936.

Once established in the artistic and intellectual milieu there, Stern presented exhibitions, set up a studio with Coppola, took on publishing projects with him, and received commissions from institutions, publishers and advertising agencies. In 1945 her home was the venue for the Madí group’s second exhibition, Movimiento de Arte Concreto Invención, and between 1956 and 1970 she organised and directed the photography workshop at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Argentina. Towards the end of her career she continued producing work on her own and also took part in a revival and international dissemination of the work of ringl pit.

The photomontage Sueño nº 41: Llamada belongs to the series Los sueños, which Grete Stern made between October 1948 and July 1951 for the magazine Idilio, published by Editorial Abril and aimed at female readers. Her work in this series fitted in with the basic nature and novel approach of the magazine, which had the usual sections and, in addition, a photo story and problem page called “Psychoanalysis will help you”. The magazine echoed the theories of Freud and the psychoanalysis movements (Freud’s complete works were translated in Argentina in 1944 with the support of the Asociación Argentina de Psicoanálisis), and it also revealed the part played by visual elements and graphic narration in mass media of that kind. Grete Stern made about 140 “dreams” for the psychoanalysis section, working with Enrique Butelman, who helped to introduce psychoanalysis in Argentina, and the theoretician and psychoanalyst Gino Germani.

The problem page asked readers to send a description of their dreams, which would be interpreted from a psychoanalytical perspective and published in the magazine. The interpretations were signed by Professor Richard Rest, a pseudonym adopted by Butelman and Germani. The latter commented on the reader’s dream, and from his comments Stern made a graphic composition or reworking of an image. Each photomontage was a succinct representation of the letter and the response, and they all showed a woman in a dramatic situation (non-communication, frustration, imprisonment, self-reproach, disconformity, etc.). In photomontage Stern found an appropriate medium with which to construct improbable, unreal images that originated in the female subconscious and were subsequently treated by male scientific rationality. In Los sueños, Stern established a relationship that equated the construction of dream images with the inherently technical process of photomontage, also revealing the part played by men (husband, boss, lover, psychiatrist) in constructing female psychological types.

In her essay “Apuntes sobre el fotomontaje” (Notes on Photomontage), written for an exhibition in 1967, Stern enumerated the technical and compositional devices used in her pictures. She recalled André Breton’s words about the construction of images: “For me, the most powerful one is the one that presents the highest degree of arbitrariness”. We see this in Sueño nº 41: Llamada, published in Idilio on 17 May 1949. Stern was familiar with the techniques and devices developed by the pioneers of avant-garde European photomontage, John Heartfield, Gustav Klutsis and Raoul Hausmann, and with the Surrealists’ defence of the creation of surprising images by including elements not connected with a rational description. She combined improbable elements and settings – here, a woman talking on the phone, a wall, a boy’s head, a man with a knife and the inside of a grocer’s shop – and used overprinting of decontextualised images, distortion of proportions and playing with scales and planes (the woman and the telephone, the boy and the weighing scale) or alteration of perspective to activate feelings of insecurity, tension, terror or irrationality, and these devices also enabled her to recreate the dream space in which such images are formed.

The photomontages are numbered in the order in which Stern made them for the magazine, but she provided the name, in this case Llamada, maintaining that the title played a structural role in the resulting image. Here, the exaggerated telephone indicates the object (or metaphor or means) of anxiety in the dream, or the person causing the disturbance in the woman’s mental state. Germani included this dream in the subseries “Dreams of non-communication”. Stern used archive pictures to make her photomontages, combining them with photographs of her daughter, Silvia Coppola, and of Etelvina del Carmen Alaniz (“Cacho”), who gave faces, bodies and expressions to the female types that featured in the dreams.

References

Grete Stern. Sueños. Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, 2015.

K. M. Sibbald: “Through a Glass Darkly: Techniques of Feminist Irony in Grete Stern’s Sueños”. Hispanic Journal, vol. 26, nos. 1/2, Spring–Autumn 2005, pp. 243–258.

Grete Stern. Sueños. IVAM Centre Julio González, Valencia, 1995.

Rocío Robles Tardío, 50 Obras maestras 1900-1950, IVAM, València, 2019, p.90.