Buenos Aires Modern, 1935-1950

Buenos Aires Modern, 1935-1950 is on view at the Kemper Art Museum through January 4, 2027. It's the first exhibition in the United States to look at the cross-disciplinary artistic community that grew in Buenos Aires in the early twentieth century, a time when more than 200,000 Europeans—many of them Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms, fascism, and the Holocaust—resettled in Argentina and reshaped its cultural landscape. It's also the first Latin American-focused show the Kemper has ever mounted.

The exhibition centers on the archives of two photographers: Grete Stern, a German Jewish refugee trained at the Bauhaus who fled Germany in 1933, and Horacio Coppola, an Argentine artist who had studied in Europe. The show traces their partnership and the wider Porteño art scene across three sections. One focuses on their photobook Buenos Aires 1936: Visión fotográfica, published in 1937. Another looks at the 'Helios' system created by Wladimiro Acosta, a Russian exile architect who also built the house the couple lived in. The third covers the younger generation of the Argentine Concrete Movement, whose members gathered at the Stern-Coppola home.

Between the Bauhaus training Stern brought from Germany, the European studies Coppola had completed, and the Russian exile Acosta, the show maps how these different threads came together in Buenos Aires. It's less a survey of a single style and more a look at the people and the city they were documenting. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue edited by assistant curator and organizer Dana Ostrander.

Buenos Aires Modern, 1935-1950 opened September 9 and runs through January 4, 2027, at the Kemper Art Museum, part of Washington University in St. Louis.