The Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis will present “Buenos Aires Modern, 1935–1950,” on view Sept. 9 to Jan. 4. This exhibition is the first in the United States to examine the inventive activities of a thriving, cross-disciplinary artistic community of locals, exiles and immigrants living in Buenos Aires during the early 20th century.
In the first half of the 20th century over 200,000 Europeans, many of them Jewish refugees, arrived in Argentina after being forced to flee a relentless series of horrors — including pogroms in Eastern Europe, fascism in Italy and national socialism in Germany, the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust and World War II. Their permanent resettlement in Buenos Aires reshaped the city’s cultural landscape, sparking collaborative exchanges between émigré artists, architects, writers, designers and local Argentine creators. “Buenos Aires Modern” explores this cultural hybridization, revealing how international modernist aesthetics — including Bauhaus art and design, concrete art and constructivism — were not simply adopted but actively transformed within the context of Argentina.
Drawing extensively from the personal archives of photographers Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola, the exhibition considers their professional and romantic partnership as representative of the many alliances formed across Argentine and European cultures during this period. Stern, a German Jewish refugee trained at the Bauhaus, fled Germany in 1933 following Hitler’s seizure of power. She soon relocated to Buenos Aires with Coppola, an Argentine artist who had been studying in Europe. Their prolific collaborations catalyzed a flourishing of modern photography in Argentina. Across three sections, the exhibition extends beyond their immediate union to consider the broader Porteño (Buenos Aires-based) artistic community, comprised of both locals and recent arrivals.
The first section, “Recent Arrivals: Photography and the Publishing Industry,” uses Stern and Coppola’s photographic projects to examine the hybridization of European modernism and Argentine culture in books, magazines and newspapers. Soon after their arrival in 1935, the couple was warmly embraced by the Porteño publishing industry, then in its “golden age” and highly receptive to modern European trends in graphic design and photography. An early example of this was Coppola’s commission to create a photobook documenting the modernization of Buenos Aires. Collaborating with Stern on its visual conception and design, the result, “Buenos Aires 1936: Visión fotográfica,” arranges Coppola’s photographs in a spiral-bound book with asymmetrical layouts and sans-serif typography, embracing both Bauhaus principles and the city’s modern ambitions.
The second section, “Adaptations: Modernizing Architecture and Graphic Design,” turns to architects and designers who applied modernist tenets to local conditions during the late 1930s and early 1940s. This is most clearly seen in Russian exile Wladimiro Acosta’s “Helios” system, which he developed in response to Buenos Aires’ location and climate. Emphasizing sun orientation, these clean and simplified designs optimized natural light for comfortable living conditions in both summer and winter, thus creating habitable spaces that could also facilitate social gatherings. Notably, the modernist residence Acosta constructed for Stern and Coppola became an important space for artists, fellow exiles and activists to meet and exchange ideas, demonstrating how design shaped both daily life and artistic experimentation.
The final section, “Integration: The Argentine Concrete Movement,” considers the younger generation of artists who frequently gathered in the Stern-Coppola home in the 1940s. Here, discussions among painters, poets and intellectuals gave rise to an eclectic Argentine concrete art movement that sought to transcend European precedents. Rejecting representation, these artists explored nonfiguration through geometric form and material experimentation, creating irregular-shaped canvases and kinetic sculptures. For instance, Gyula Kosice’s “Coplanal” (1947) invites physical interaction through its movable elements, such as spinning discs. By creating a range of experimental and participatory works, these artists intended to level the relationship between maker, object and spectator, with the Marxist aim of awakening viewers to their own material conditions in society.
“‘Buenos Aires Modern’ reveals a moment when artists working across disciplines responded to displacement, cultural exchange and sociopolitical upheaval by forging new visual languages,” said Dana Ostrander, an assistant curator and organizer of the exhibition. “Focusing on a thriving network of creatives, the exhibition shows how the unique context of Buenos Aires — its sociopolitical conditions, immigration history and climate — fostered the development of an unprecedented strand of modernism tailored toward local needs and expectations.”
The exhibition reflects a meaningful episode in the Kemper Art Museum’s history. “In the mid-1940s, WashU professor and curator H. W. Janson acquired a significant collection of works by predominantly European artists displaced by German national socialism,” said Sabine Eckmann, the William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator. “That focus continues to shape our exhibitions today. ‘Buenos Aires Modern’ shifts this lens to Latin America for the first time, expanding our engagement with transnational histories of artistic exchange.”
The exhibition reveals mid-20th-century Buenos Aires as a vibrant locale in which artists hailing from around the world integrated, adapted and transformed international modernism in response to their South American context.
A catalog edited by Ostrander, with contributions by Fernando Luiz Lara, Rachel Mohl, Megan A. Sullivan and Elizabeth Mangone, will accompany the exhibition.
The exhibition is made possible by the leadership support of the William T. Kemper Foundation. All exhibitions at the Kemper Art Museum are supported by members of the Director’s Circle, with major annual support provided by Emily and Teddy Greenspan and additional generous annual support from Michael Forman and Jennifer Rice, Julie Kemper Foyer, Joanne Gold and Andrew Stern, David and Dorothy Kemper, Ron and Pamela Mass, and Kim and Bruce Olson. Further support is provided by the Hortense Lewin Art Fund, the Ken and Nancy Kranzberg Fund and members of the Kemper Art Museum.
