Buenos Aires Modern, 1935–1950 explores Argentina’s capital as a vibrant creative laboratory where artists forged new visual languages in response to the city’s hybrid population, rapidly modernizing infrastructure, and complex political terrain. The exhibition highlights the activities of a dynamic community of creative practitioners—visual artists, architects, graphic designers, dancers, and poets—revealing how exile, displacement, and cultural exchange transformed the social landscape of Argentina during the early twentieth century. Anchored in the art of Grete Stern, Horacio Coppola, and their social circle, the exhibition traces how modernism was not merely adopted but actively transformed in Buenos Aires.
During the late 1930s, European artists, exiles, and refugees began arriving in Buenos Aires in vast numbers. They made the transatlantic journey to escape oppression on multiple fronts, from the Spanish Civil War to World War II to the Holocaust. One of these migrant-artists was Grete Stern, a German-Jewish photographer and graphic designer who trained at the Bauhaus before she was forced to flee Germany in 1933. Stern soon married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola, and the pair permanently settled in Buenos Aires in 1935. Their marriage and artistic collaboration is emblematic of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. This exhibition draws extensively from the couple’s personal archives, while also considering their larger creative community.
The exhibition’s first section, Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry, focuses on Stern and Coppola’s photographic practices in Argentina, using their partnerships with figures like the famed writer Jorge Luis Borges, the cultural critic Victoria Ocampo, and the political cartoonist Clément Moreau to understand the merging of European modernism and Argentine culture. A selection of exile-run publications, modernist photographs of the city, and anti-fascist illustrations reveal how a multitude of cultural ideas converged in Buenos Aires during the late 1930s.
The second section, Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design, expands to consider Stern and Coppola’s broader circle. Their network included many architects and graphic designers who embraced modernism and began to envision alternative modes of living—buoyed by new technologies and an enthusiasm for scientific advancement. These included figures like the Italian exile Attilio Rossi, who modernized graphic design formats and introduced the machine-printed book, contributing to a golden age of publishing in Buenos Aires. Within the built environment, the exiled architect Wladimiro Acosta adapted European modernist architecture to the Argentine climate. The homes he built—including one commissioned by Coppola and Stern—encouraged communal gathering and the exchange of ideas.
The third and final section, Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement, considers the young Argentine and Uruguayan artists who gathered at the Stern-Coppola home. These included members of the Madí movement (such as Gyula Kosice and Carmelo Arden Quin), as well as those in the competing group, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (among them Tómas Maldonado and Lidy Prati). This radical new generation forged an eclectic Argentine concrete movement in response to European precedents. They rejected figuration and the rectangular frame in favor of pure, angular abstraction. Motivated by Marxist ideologies, they believed art that could be experienced physically would awaken viewers to their own material conditions in society.
An illustrated, scholarly catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Edited by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, the book will feature essays in English (with Spanish translations) by Ostrander and scholars Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, and Megan Sullivan, as well as a selection of extended artist biographies by Ostrander and Elizabeth Mangone. The catalog will be published by the Museum and distributed nationally and internationally by the University of Chicago Press.
This exhibition is curated by Dana Ostrander, assistant curator, Kemper Art Museum.