Born: 1904 Elberfeld, Germany
Died: 1999 Buenos Aires, Argentina
Year of Migration to the UK: 1934
Biography
Photographer Grete Stern was born into a Germany-Jewish family in Elberfeld, near Wuppertal, Germany in 1904. Her family were involved in the textile manufacturing business and she often travelled to visit relatives in England, where she also attended primary school (Sandler and Mandelbaum). Between 1924 and 1927 she trained as a graphic artist and typographer at the Weissenhof College of Applied Arts in Stuttgart and in 1926 began working as a freelance graphic designer in Wuppertal. She turned to photography after seeing an exhibition of works by celebrated American photographers Edward Weston and Paul Outerbridge, and in 1927 moved to Berlin to take private lessons with the German photographer Walter Peterhans. Among his students was Ellen Auerbach (née Rosenberg), with whom Stern established a close friendship that lasted for the rest of their lives. Together, the two women set up one of the world’s first female-run commercial photographic firms, ringl + pit (the name derived from Stern’s childhood nickname (Ringl) and a dancer named Pepita, whom Auerbach apparently resembled). They were unusual in ceding individual authorship and crediting all their photographs to their collective signature (Otto, 2020). In 1930, and, again from 1932–33, Stern went to Dessau to renew her studies with Peterhans, now Master of Photography at the renowned Bauhaus School for Art and Design, where among her fellow students she also met her future husband, the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola.
In December 1933, Stern was forced to abandon the ringl + pit studio when she fled Nazi Germany with Coppola (whom she married the following year) and her brother Walter. She successfully transported all of her photographic equipment and furniture and quickly re-established a photographic studio in London. When Auerbach joined her in 1935, they began to work together once more; their last joint commission was for a maternity hospital brochure. During her brief two years in London, Stern mainly took portraits of the German-speaking circle in exile, among them the Marxist philosopher Karl Korsch, the psychoanalyst Paula Heimann, the playwright Bertolt Brecht and the actress Helene Weigel (whom she had met on her journey to London). Portraiture remained one of her great strengths: the poet Maria Elena Walsh later described her photographic portraits as ‘facial nudes’ (Marcoci and Meister, 2015).
Later in 1935 Stern and Coppola immigrated to Argentina and, in October of that year, they held an exhibition at the offices of the avant-garde literary magazine Sur, which has been described as ‘the foundation of modern photography in Argentina’ (Marcoci and Meister, 2015). Working as a woman in a male-dominated society was a challenge, but Stern became a major figure in the development of photographic art in twentieth-century Argentina. In 1943 she presented her first solo exhibition in Buenos Aires, featuring only portraits. She became the photographer for the Municipal Architect’s Office and director and photographer of the Department of Correspondence in the city’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. She briefly taught photography and made documentary images of Argentina's indigenous people. In 1994 her work was included in the exhibition Art from Argentina 1920–1994 at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. In 1996 Juan Mandelbaum’s documentary Ringl and Pit, exploring the lives and partnership of Stern and Auerbach, won numerous awards. Stern died in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1999, aged 95. Her work is represented in the UK by one photograph in the Tate and internationally in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Jewish Museum and Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Valencian Institute of Modern Art, Spain. In 2005, Stern and Coppola were the subjects of the exhibition From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horatio Coppola at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Related books
- Elizabeth Otto, ‘ringl + pit and the Queer Art of Failure’, October, No. 173, 2020, pp. 37-64
- Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler, Bauhaus Women: a Global Perspective (London: Herbert Press, 2019)
- Christina Wieder, 'Montages of Exile. Photographic Techniques and Spatial Dimensions in the Artwork of Grete Stern', Jewish Culture and History (2019)
- Peter Wakelin, Refuge and Renewal: Migration and British Art (Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2019)
- Roxana Marcoci, Sarah Hermanson Meister and Jodi Roberts, From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2015)
- Elizabeth Otto, 'Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola', Artforum International, Vol. 54, Fasc. 1, (Sep 2015), p. 387
- Boris Friedewald and Jane Michael, Women Photographers: from Julia Margaret Cameron to Cindy Sherman (Munich
- London
- New York: Prestel, 2014)
- Lyle Rexer, 'Grete in Dreamland. The Photomontages of Grete Stern', Aperture, No. 187 (Summer 2007), pp. 60-67
- 'Obituary of Ellen Auerbach', The Daily Telegraph, 03 Aug 2004, p. 21
- Amanda Hopkinson, 'Obituary of Grete Stern', The Guardian, 18 Jan 2000, p. 18
Public collections
Related organisations
- Weissenhof College of Applied Arts, Stuttgart (student)
- The Bauhaus (student)
Related web links
- Clara Sandler and Juan Mandelbaum, 'Grete Stern', Jewish Women`s Archive
- Information and installation views of 'From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola' exhibition at Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015
Selected exhibitions
- From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017)
- Case Studies. Grete Stern, Valencian Institute of Modern Art, Valencia, Spain (2016)
- Grete Stern. From the Bauhaus to the Gran Chaco, Berlin State Museum (2011)
- Galerie 213, Paris (2002)
- Art from Argentina, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1994)
Ben Uri archive
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Grete Stern]
Ben Uri library
Publications related to [Grete Stern] in the Ben Uri Library