Malaga, (EFE).- The Carmen Thyssen Museum in Malaga is hosting the first joint exhibition in Spain by photographers Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern until September 10. Couple -sentimental and professional- who portrayed the most modern and avant-garde Buenos Aires of the thirties and forties.
“Fervor de Buenos Aires” is the title of this show, which borrows its name from the first collection of poems by Jorge Luis Borges. A book that celebrates one hundred years, with whom Coppola had a friendship and shared walks through the capital of Buenos Aires.
Some twenty photomontages by the German Greta Stern (1904-1999) and 125 photographs of the city taken by the Argentine Horacio Coppola (1906-2012) make up this ambitious retrospective. It offers a tour of Buenos Aires at the beginning of the century, in the midst of a process of transformation, growth and boiling.
The great portrait painter of Buenos Aires
Born into a wealthy family, Horacio Coppola initially had a vocation for cinema. That influence is perceptible in the first works of his youth. The one of his most avant-garde, geometric and abstract photographs, attached to the current of the New Vision of the late 20s.
In 1932 he traveled to Berlin (Germany) and studied at the Bauhaus school. There he meets Stern, with whom she falls in love and with whom he returns to Buenos Aires in 1933.
Already in his native country, in 1936, Coppola received a commission from the municipality of the capital to commemorate the fourth centenary of the founding of the city by Pedro de Mendoza. The assignment ends up being a tribute to his hometown.
The city is experiencing a time of great changes, expansion and a new urbanism. Fascinated by architecture from a young age, the artist accurately captures the pulse of the city and the life of passers-by.
The artistic director of Thyssen Málaga, Lourdes Moreno, explained that Coppola photographs “from an absolutely modern perspective” streets, squares and avenues, the new obelisk erected in 1936, street furniture. In these images, the great character is the metropolis.
Coppola, who died at the age of 105, is considered the great portrait painter of the Argentine capital. “It is to Buenos Aires what Brassaï is to Paris or Helen Levitt and Lisette Model to New York”, Moreno pointed out.
An innovative photographer
The Buenos Aires of Horacio Coppola is also that of Grete Stern, who leads Argentina to an innovative photographic practice: photomontage.
The Thyssen shows a part of his work that belongs to a very special period of his production. The one corresponding to the years 1948-1951, when he made 140 compositions for the women’s magazine “Idilio” that accompany weekly the interpretations of the dreams of the readers in the section “Psychoanalysis will help you”.
The Thyssen collects 25 of these photomontages. They all combine compositional creativity and technical experimentation with a critique of the situation of women in Peronist Argentina.
Lourdes Moreno has pointed out that the works of these two artists, referents in the history of modern photography of the 20th century, propose an unprecedented look at the Argentine scene of the time. All with experimental compositions, singular framings and marked contrasts of light and shadow.
Coppola’s photographs are part of the Fundación Telefónica’s art collection. Stern’s photomontages arrive in Malaga thanks to the Valencian Institute of Modern Art (IVAM). EFE