Grete Stern’s Splitting Women: Conflicting Identities in Peronist Argentina

Amelia Russo

The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Abstract

Between 1948 and 1951, an Argentine reader of the popular women’s magazine Idilio could encounter the artwork of Grete Stern while perusing the weekly column “El psicoanálisis te ayudará” (“Psychoanalysis will help you”). Stern created nearly 150 photomontages to illustrate this dream analysis column, which was based on anecdotes from middle-class women who wrote to Idilio.

 In this paper, I argue that Stern’s representations of women and womanhood in the resulting body of work, collectively entitled Sueños, are reflective of the conflicting and changing roles of women and of female identity during the first Peronist presidency (1946–1952). The progressive changes initiated under president Juan Domingo Perón and his wife Eva Duarte Perón that granted Argentine women civil rights and enfranchised them in political life were in many ways antithetical to the traditional social mores promoted in the regime’s rhetoric and its idealized version of the Peronist woman. Stern’s oneiric artworks evince the ambiguous and precarious position of Argentine women by subtly satirizing traditional roles, challenging hierarchical gender relations, and questioning female agency and self-determination. Wielding photomontage as a critical method, the artist created a visual discourse that centered the female subject’s uncertain position at the crux of changing social politics in modern Argentina and its attendant anxieties, confusion, and fears, but also its hopes, dreams, and desires.

Previous scholarly examinations of how Stern’s photomontages intervened into conventional systems of representing women in Argentine society have been carried out within a particular sociopolitical framework. As an extension of this social art-historical inquiry, my interest for this discussion is to analyze how issues of feminine and masculine behavior and traits, female and male roles and labor, and private- and public-sphere binaries emerge in Stern’s imagery. Reviewing historical accounts of the activities of the Perón administration, considering concurrent changes in women’s social realities, and visually assessing Stern’s ironic treatment of her subject matter assist me in explaining the often-stark contradictions and even instances of splitting that characterize these works.

Grete Stern’s Splitting Women:

Conflicting Identities in Peronist Argentina

Splitting. Doubling. The uncanny. Division. The underlying themes of Grete Stern’s photomontage Los Sueños de Desdoblamiento (The Dreams of Splitting, 1949; Fig. 1) convey a sense of coming apart, a lack of coherence. The scene has the appearance of multiple, irreconcilable parts. Its setting is a domestic interior. A woman, presumably a mother, stands next to a table, speaking to her preadolescent daughter who appears to be studying. She wears a plaid dress and dark, leather shoes; though casual, her appearance is considered, completed with a fashionable necklace and dark lipstick. A small vase of fresh flowers sits on the linen-covered table. From the table to the female subjects, the components of the composition are properly dressed according to middle-class standards. To the left of the mother-daughter duo, another woman stands observing the scene. Uncannily, she is identical to the mother despite the two figures’ differing poses. The second woman is unacknowledged by the main figures, as if there were two parallel realms of reality.

One could interpret this instance of doubling within a Freudian framework of familial relations, an approach that would be apt given the context of the artwork’s creation and dissemination. In fact, Los Sueños de Desdoblamiento is one of nearly 150 photomontages that Stern (1904–1999) created between 1948 and 1951 to illustrate a dream analysis column in the popular Argentine women’s magazine Idilio, whose writers drew on Freudian and Jungian concepts in their responses to readers’ letters. While a reading of the images from this series couched in psychoanalytic theory would almost certainly yield compelling results, with this paper I instead analyze this photomontage and others in the Sueños series in the greater sociopolitical context of the period when Stern produced them, paying particular attention to her material methods. Indeed, I propose that Stern’s representations of women and womanhood in this particular work and in her Sueños series as a whole reflect the conflicting and changing roles of women and of female identity during the first Peronist presidency (1946–1952).

The progressive changes initiated under president Juan Domingo Perón and his wife Eva Duarte Perón that granted Argentine women civil rights and enfranchised them in political life were in many ways antithetical to the traditional social mores that the regime promoted via public speeches, radio programs, and print media. They also contrasted with the idealized version of the Peronist woman, represented by Eva, in propagandistic campaigns in textbooks, on posters, and in the press. The Peronist doctrine, nationalist in spirit, emphasized social justice, political sovereignty, and economic freedom for modern Argentina. In offering a third position (tercera posición) situated between capitalism and communism, Peronism promised a new social order of equality in which previously disenfranchised and marginalized populations would be better integrated into society.^[1] Women were one such social sector, and the Peronist aspiration for upward social mobility swelled the middle-class population. Even so, historians of the Perón regime recognize its conflicted approach to gender dynamics, aligning it with the tradition-modernity duality that underscored the regime’s ideology more broadly.^[2] Ultimately, Perón’s ostensibly innovative social policy—particularly with regard to women’s relative emancipation from confinement to the private sphere—did not align with the outdated maternal and domestic ideals and expectations of subordination to men that the regime simultaneously promulgated. In this respect, scholar Iliana Cepero observes that “cultural analyses of Peronism underscore its paradoxical nature” given that “Peronism delivered disparate and even apparently conflicting messages to its political consumers.”^[3] Cepero argues that this inconsistency is evident in the regime’s photographic propaganda. This logic can similarly be detected in Stern’s artistic representations. If we consider the works in her Sueños series as documents of the female condition under Perón, they too reflect the myriad ways in which the lived experience of Argentina’s new woman was one of paradoxes. The photomontages’ placement within a psychoanalytic context further emphasizes their sentiment of ambivalence: as the historian Marino Ben Plotkin contends, psychoanalysis was popularized in Argentina as a critical tool to assuage the anxieties of a society caught in the interstices between tradition and modernity.^[4]

In her oneiric photomontages, Stern evinces the ambiguous and precarious position of Argentine women by subtly satirizing traditional roles, challenging hierarchical gender relations, and questioning female agency and self-determination. Numerous scholars have identified this pronounced critique of contemporary gender dynamics in Stern’s work. Following the pioneering research of photography historian Luis Priamo, which resulted in a comprehensive catalogue of the Sueños series in 2004, David Williams Foster, Ana María León, Mariano Ben Plotkin, Kay Sibbald, and Alejandra Uslenghi have contributed significantly to the English-language analysis of the series.^[5] Those scholars have examined how Stern’s photomontages intervened into conventional systems of representing women in Argentine society within a particular sociopolitical framework. As an extension of this social art-historical inquiry, my aim is to analyze how issues of feminine and masculine behavior and traits, female and male roles and labor, and private- and public-sphere binaries emerge in Stern’s imagery, which was based on the dreams and waking experiences recounted by middle-class women of the Perón era who wrote to Idilio. Reviewing historical accounts of the activities of the Perón administration, considering concurrent changes in women’s social realities, and visually assessing Stern’s ironic treatment of her subject matter will assist me in explaining the often-stark contradictions and even instances of splitting that characterize many of these works. I will argue that the women Stern depicted in the Sueños photomontages are caught between the burgeoning independence of women in political life, the public realm, and the workforce on the one hand, and the expectations of submission to ingrained patriarchal values on the other, with no apparent resolution. The artist conveys this sense of bewildering entrapment not only through the content of her imagery, but also through her use of photomontage.

The Sueños series was not the first instance in which the German-born Argentine artist tackled the problematics of the constructed nature of femininity and female identity. In fact, her treatment of the Weimar Republic’s New Woman in her commercial photography and advertising work in Germany closely mirrored her depictions of the new Argentine woman under Perón in her oneiric artworks. Between 1929 and 1933 Stern ran a photographic studio in Berlin under the name ringl + pit. This was a joint venture with her business partner, artistic collaborator, and friend Ellen Auerbach (1906–2004). The two photographers had met in 1928 in Berlin as apprentices of photographer Walter Peterhans, an experience during which they cultivated not only their rigorous technical skills, but also the theoretical stance that the photographic medium could be socially engaged with modern life.^[6] This foundational tenet undergirded their work in the studio as avant-garde artists, commercial photographers, and graphic designers.

As art historian Maud Lavin observes, Stern and Auerbach developed works that subtly dismantled the accepted, contemporary view of women by deviating from advertising’s representational standard of women as “idealized, machine-made commodities.”^[7] For example, in the hair-dye advertisement Komol (1931; Fig. 2), rather than monumentalizing or fetishizing the perfected woman, the artists emphasize the artifice and constructedness of femininity. They achieve this aim by fashioning the figure’s head with assembled, layered materials rather than using a stylized human model or machine-produced mannequin.^[8] The resulting image conveys the message that “beauty” of this type is not natural but instead painstakingly fabricated. Lavin’s analysis offers perspective on how the roots of Stern’s feminist critique in the Sueños works originated in her earlier collaborative work with Auerbach. Further, the scholar’s discussion incidentally demonstrates the clear relevance of the attitude that ringl + pit assumed in the particular climate of their production context to Stern’s representation of the modern Argentine woman as discussed in this paper.^[9] After outlining the “major changes in women’s social status” in the Weimar Republic—prompted by women’s suffrage, declining birth rates, and increasing presence of women in the workplace—Lavin explains that the Great Depression catalyzed a conservative rejoinder to the New Woman’s expanded public presence. As a result, she contends, “Advertising images were complex representations of the anxieties and desires concerning new identities for women in Weimar Germany. In these ads, women were addressed as ‘empowered’ buyers, but often only insofar as their power was limited to purchasing products that would enable them to construct themselves—through make-up, shampoo, powder—as exchangeable objects, commodities.”^[10] The Janus-faced character of the Peronist discourse on gender echoes this earlier example of the tensions that arise with the liberation of women in patriarchal societies: a process in which women navigate conflicting, “new” roles in society under a regime that mobilizes a few progressive measures, only to regress through the continual reaffirmation of traditional values and social mores that preserve the gendered power hierarchy. In short, Stern’s former experience in the age of Weimar Germany’s New Woman laid the foundation for her consideration of the female position in Peronist Argentina.

Owing to the rising power of the Nazi regime, Stern fled to London in 1933 with Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola (1906–2012), whom she had met the year prior while attending classes taught by Peterhans at the Berlin Bauhaus, and would later marry. Stern operated her photographic practice while in London, and it continued to mature after the couple emigrated to Buenos Aires in 1936 to escape the mounting political tensions in Europe. Just before their official move to Coppola’s country of birth, the two artists mounted a joint presentation of their photography in the summer of 1935 at the Buenos Aires editorial offices of Sur, the avant-garde literary magazine.^[11] Although the exhibition garnered little contemporary attention, scholars regard it as the first such display of modern photography in Argentina, on account of its unconventional subject matter and artistic techniques relative to the nature of artistic photography in Buenos Aires at the time. Both the exhibition’s checklist and pamphlet (authored by the duo) underscored Stern’s position that photography was relevant to modern life, a Bauhaus-informed principle that had achieved somewhat mainstream status in Germany but was still a radical concept in Argentina in the mid-1930s.^[12] Stern developed her diverse practice by working in a wide spectrum of genres, including portraiture, still life, compositions, advertising photography, graphic design, cityscapes, documentation of artworks and anthropological artifacts, and more.^[13] She also created occasional photomontages for magazines and other publications and, most notably, contributed an emblematic image to Grupo Madí’s  journal Arte Madí Universal in 1947 (Fig. 3).^[14]

According to Priamo, by the mid-1940s Stern had established herself and gained recognition artistically and professionally in Buenos Aires.^[15] It was around this time that Stern received the commission to produce illustrations of the dreams analyzed in Idilio magazine’s weekly column “El psicoanálisis te ayudará” (“Psychoanalysis will help you”). Beginning with the magazine’s inaugural issue in October 1948, readers interested in submitting their dreams for review could complete a twenty-nine-item questionnaire delving into issues such as personal history, memories, childhood experiences, habits, fantasies, and dreams.^[16] The readers who participated were predominantly female, and one dream was featured in the column per issue.^[17] The resulting magazine spread included a response letter to the woman whose dream had been selected, a written analysis of the dream, Stern’s illustration of said analysis, and a blank questionnaire for future readers’ reference (Fig. 4). Scholars have noted the acute visual and ideological contrast between Stern’s imagery and the rest of Idilio, given the former’s “open criticism of traditional gender relations” and the latter’s tendency to “[promote] conservative values in terms of gender.”^[18] Stern’s representations of women stood in high relief next to the magazine’s romance stories, relationship advice column, and photo essays that reinforced a singular feminine archetype.   

Working together under the collective pseudonym of Professor Richard Rest, Argentine psychologist Enrique Butelman read the submissions and corresponded with readers via the published letter, while Italian-immigrant sociologist Gino Germani composed the psychoanalytically-informed dream interpretations.^[19] While Butelman guided the selection of a particular dream and its interpretation, Germani supplied Stern with the text of the dream, discussed its interpretation with her, and made recommendations for how she might visualize the composition.^[20] As Priamo recounts, based on the artist’s own recollections, Germani “would request certain layout characteristics and specify the depiction of elements such as flowers or animals, unstable shapes, or figures performing certain actions. Stern would subsequently develop her combinative creation and her own point of view on the subject, which resulted in works of fairly free invention.”^[21] As we shall see, Stern’s “own point of view” took on a distinctly feminist tone, while the creative license she was able to assert facilitated her “free invention” of a visual discourse—one that that centered the changing roles of women in modern Argentina and the anxieties, confusion, and fears, but also the hopes, dreams, and desires that accompanied them.

The compositions in the Sueños works are narrative scenes that typically depict episodes of romantic, familial, or personal drama. They reference both classic psychoanalytic tropes and “widely recognized motifs of the particular traumas of women’s lives . . . as regards their repression and oppression by masculinism,” according to historian David Williams Foster.^[22] The protagonist, presumably the reader-dreamer, wears plainly her middle-class status. She is immersed in characteristically “female” activities whose feminine designations are either blatantly evident in the picture or, in instances in which Stern treats the subject more vaguely, denoted by the accompanying dream-interpretation text.^[23] Even while the protagonist undertakes domestic chores, performs her maternal role, presents herself as a sexualized object to the male gaze, or exhibits emotionally driven behavior, there seem to be persistent, threatening undertones signaling potential physical or psychological danger. One work, Los Sueños de Evasión (The Dreams of Evasion, 1950; Fig. 5), features a woman climbing a washboard in a desperate attempt to escape a bin of sudsy water, but also gestures toward the antiquated role of homemaker as signaled by the outdated laundry technology.^[24] In another, Los Sueños de Muñecos (Dreams of Dolls, 1949; Fig. 6), a mother trapped by her maternal responsibilities shields her face in horror as a baby doll advances toward her down a dead-end alleyway. The main figure of Los Sueños con Actores (Dreams with Actors, 1951; Fig. 7) clutches her heart and stares admiringly but also expectantly at the mirage of a man’s face in the horn of her phonograph. Los Sueños de Remembranzas (Dreams of Remembrances,1950; Fig. 8) features a woman who is haunted by the framed image of a man whose memory she is trying to escape. These works are just a few examples of Stern’s photomontages in which one sees the recurring theme of women engaging in stereotypical female activities.

Importantly, this selection of works also exhibits the aesthetic approaches and formal possibilities Stern could achieve via the photomontage method of cutting and pasting graphic fragments. This technique allowed her to manipulate proportion, perspective, and contextual relationships between elements in order to emphasize the constructed nature of an image, debase the veracity of a photograph, and critique a composition’s own content. Working with friends, relatives, and neighbors as her actors, Stern staged photoshoots to produce her materials and additionally mined her own photographic archive for negatives that functioned as ready-made visual components for her photomontages.^[25 From her days of ringl + pit, the artist was familiar with the Berlin Dadaists’ invention and politicized use of montage. In that regard, her Sueños series can be viewed within the historical legacy of female artists such as Hannah Höch (1889–1978) who used the medium. Stern’s deliberate choice of photomontage aligns her with this feminist, political tradition and continues her prior experimentation with modes of representing the Weimar-era New Woman.^[26] In a 1964 lecture entitled “Apuntes sobre fotomontaje” (“Notes on Photomontage”), Stern stressed “the importance that photography has in the social, political, and expressive life of humankind.”^[27] Despite the lecture’s posterior delivery date, the sentiments the artist expressed at the Foto Club Argentino in Buenos Aires are applicable to her Sueños series. The radical nature of distorting proportions and perspectives as well as, in Stern’s own words, “gathering improbable elements” in order to recontextualize the disparate parts, demonstrate the “compositional possibilities” of the medium and position it as a material process that can simultaneously thematize and reflexively criticize the artwork’s own subject matter.^[28] This is especially true in the Argentine context in which photomontage was largely alien in avant-garde circles, and even more so in the mass media.

In an essay for the exhibition Montage and Modern Life, curator Matthew Teitelbaum explains that “montage practice is about radical realignments of power.” “By dramatically repositioning various figures and objects,” he continues, “montage suggests new paradigms of authority.”^[29] Stern enacts precisely this paradigm shift in Los Sueños de Condensación (Dreams of Condensation, 1950; Fig. 9).^[30] In this work, a young woman stands in a pasture among a few donkeys. She photographs one that has the head of a young man. With her modern dress and high heels and the sleek Rolleiflex camera she wields, the woman is conspicuously out of place in the countryside. Rest’s text explains that the woman rejects the man’s advances on account of his lack of education and sophistication; the image seems to communicate: “He is only a country bumpkin after all.”^[31] The camera plays a crucial role in this visual narrative as an instrument of power. As the woman towers above her suitor who kneels at her feet, she prepares to “shoot” or “capture” him—“photography as hunting device and man as prey,” scholar Alejandra Uslenghi quips in her analysis of this dream work.^[32] The picture upends conventional male-female power relations and posits the modern woman as a figure of self-appointed authority. Uslenghi writes:

The woman is in control of the machine, which extends her gaze and capacity of control over the male-animal body. . . . A woman with a camera, as Stern shows, is not only capable of reversing traditional gender hierarchies and evoking the imaginary of the new woman—one who nonchalantly wears high heels in the countryside—but has fundamentally forged a singular point of view; she is someone who has found an instrument of self-determination.^[33]

 Indeed, the female protagonist’s claiming of control is a “radical realignment” of traditional male-female roles. While working in photography—a medium that promises a truthful representation of whatever is set before the camera lens—Stern could only have conveyed the hybrid man’s physically submissive position and inferior animal status by using the montage technique.

The authorial power that Stern asserts in her poignant use of photomontage reverberates in the young woman discussed above, who is one of the more confident and assertive female characters represented in the Sueños works. That she is more assertive than other figures portrayed by Stern could speak to the intimations of changing roles in Argentine societal modernization. Peronist ideology implied a promise that women, too, could earn wages outside of the home, find self-fulfillment beyond the confines of marriage and motherhood, or even be politicians. Indeed, Perón instituted legal and constitutional changes in the areas of labor, marriage, politics, and education designed to foster the upward mobility of women and their equal integration into society. As early as 1943, in his role as Minister of Labor, he created the División de Trabajo y Asistencia a la Mujer (Women’s Division at the Secretariat of Labor) to study “the economic and social problems of the female workforce in order to make recommendations for improvement in their working conditions.”^[34] The percentage of women working in Argentine industry grew at an increased rate compared to that of the male sector and, by 1949, forty-five percent of industrial workers in Buenos Aires were female.^[35] There was also a rise in women’s salaries and a reduction of the gap between male and female wages.^[36] Under his presidential governance, Perón instated labor laws that limited women’s working hours to forty-four per week and introduced a minimum wage for women who performed work for their employers at home.^[37] Additionally, women workers were celebrated publicly, and quite extravagantly, as “queens,” in a new ritual called “Reinas del Trabajo” at the annual May Day labor celebration.^[38] To ease their double workload and facilitate their being “Queens of Labor,” the administration instituted state-organized preschools and kindergartens as a form of affordable childcare for working mothers.^[39] In his 1949 revision to the Constitution of 1853, the president awarded women equal rights to child custody in cases of marital dissolution.^[40] Importantly, in this constitutional amendment, Perón also codified women’s right to vote and be elected to political office, which he had granted in 1947.^[41] Also under Perón, the illiteracy rate among adult women decreased and a greater number of female students graduated from university.^[42]

Perón’s seemingly progressive enactment of measures to bring about tangible improvements in women’s rights, however, clashed with the conservatism promulgated by his regime’s discourse. This conservatism stressed traditional values and maintained women’s subordinate position to men.^[43] This paradox was precisely the dynamic that conflicted the modern Argentine woman. As the public figure of the wife of the president and a political leader in her own right, Eva was the principal model of the ambiguous identity of the Peronist woman.^[44] As head of the Partido Peronista Femenino (Female Peronist Party) and the Fundación Eva Perón (Eva Perón Foundation), the social services arm of the government, Eva exercised her autonomy powerfully. Yet in her public addresses, she presented herself as subservient to her presidential husband, and employed conservative rhetoric that positioned women as inferior to men and relegated them to their supposed “natural” place in the domestic realm. For example, in 1951, in response to the limited representation of women in the recent government elections, Eva stated, “We are used to sacrifice [on men’s behalf], which for us women is the most natural thing in the world.”^[45] Additionally, she politicized motherhood by advancing the logic that women’s right to vote was imperative so they could fulfill their roles as “[Peronist] domestic missionaries,” explains Plotkin.^[46] “Women have an important role to play in this movement,” Eva advised in 1950, “because we will try to bring Peronism to the soul of the Argentine child.”^[47] The rhetoric of Eva’s campaign did not promote the enfranchisement of women as an opportunity for equal participation in society. What aspired to be emancipatory was, in actuality, undergirded by repressive and oppressive perspectives toward women.

Notions of domestic entrapment, whether of homemaker, wife, or mother, figure strongly in Sueños. Stern portrays scenes of oppression and conflicted anxiety regarding the female role by using photomontage, in the words of Dawn Ades, to “re-organize or dis-organize” reality.^[48] Through a strategy of disorganizing reality, the artist makes a critical comment on Peronist reality. For instance, Los Sueños de Ambición (Dreams of Ambition, 1950; Fig. 10), is an image of a neatly dressed woman trapped in a shrunken domestic interior. It is an elegant environment with architectural details such as crown molding and decorative textiles, including a patterned rug and lace tablecloth. While the figure braces herself against the floor with one arm, she holds the other high to shield her face from the frighteningly close chandelier. Thanks to the exaggerated proportions, the message of this particular photomontage is clear: this woman has literally outgrown the space she inhabits. Figuratively, however, the psychoanalytic and artistic interpretations of this dream diverge.^[49] Rest’s interpretative text suggests that the dreamer has evolved beyond her current life, which is fit for a “chica” (girl).^[50] However, based on the formal decoration of the room, it does not appear that Stern’s visual interpretation depicts a woman outgrowing her childhood. It suggests, rather, that the woman has evolved beyond her domestic role and feels constrained by the expectation that she self-identify as a homemaker. In contrast with Rest’s narrative, Stern’s imagery imparts a sense of urgency, a need to escape rather than a celebration of maturation. Rest’s and Stern’s differing representations of the scenario underscore the discord between implicitly accepting and eschewing imposed roles of female domesticity. They also clearly highlight an instance in which Stern exercised her creative liberty for the purpose of critique.

Another moment in which Stern distorts reality to comment on the seemingly inescapable confinement of the domestic realm occurs in Los Sueños de Frustracíon (Dreams of Frustration, 1951; Fig. 11). The protagonist is depicted playing tennis, but instead of holding a proper racquet she holds a frying pan. The implication is apparent: even in public, while pursuing a modern activity outside of the home, a woman is still tethered to the kitchen. Similarly, another composition in which this sentiment is expressed without directly depicting homelife is Los Sueños de Obstáculos (Dreams of Obstacles, 1949; Fig. 12). Here, a trouser-wearing woman (this particular defiance of feminine dress is an anomaly in Sueños) has accidentally stepped on an oversized nail in the sand at the beach. Foster’s provocative analysis of this image proposes that it ironically warns its female audience that “if a woman does emerge from her sphere of protection, she is exposed to the very threats that the masculinized agent claims to be protecting her from.”^[51] Her implicit confinement to the domestic and feminine sphere is conveyed via her exclusion from public space, lest she risk the danger present in exploring beyond her limits. 

Aside from the proper roles that one is expected to assume, the gendering of behavioral traits also takes center stage in Sueños. In Los Sueños de Animales (Dreams of Animals, 1948; Fig. 13), the paradoxical nature of society’s expectations of feminine behavior is palpable. In the composition, a woman is locked inside a glass structure. She stares terrified out the window at a lion, which targets her through the insubstantial façade. Rest’s dream interpretation posits that the attacking lion is the manifestation of the woman’s repressed emotions, which are held in her unconscious as a result of her efforts to submit all of her sentiments to “reason.”^[52] Now, the written analysis explains, her unconscious is rebelling. The subtext of that interpretation is that a woman’s privileging of rational thinking (conventionally masculine behavior) over emotional thinking (conventionally feminine behavior) is a serious threat to her well-being.

 Interestingly, Stern’s visual depiction complicates the original interpretation by adding an additional dimension. While Rest refers to the space as a “refugio” (shelter), the artist emphatically depicts a domestic interior marked by a shag carpet, scallop-edged curtains, and a potted plant.^[53] Rather than the glass structure being a place of refuge, Stern’s representation evokes a domestic prison. The visual interpretation appears to question whether the element of danger is the act of suppressing emotions (that is, a woman acting like a man) or the “feminine” emotions themselves. It is conceivable that Stern purposely presented the situation vaguely to subvert the dream interpretation’s subtext; “It’s not as straightforward as you say, Rest,” her imagery seems to counter. The artist seems to prompt her audience to question the ramifications of both scenarios: a homemaker submitting to stereotypical expectations for affective female behavior, or a homemaker acting rationally and eschewing emotion—in short, thinking in a customarily masculine manner. Her photomontage implies that, in the contemporary milieu, this woman’s behavior compromises her safety and renders her vulnerable to attack either way. 

The conflict Stern depicts—between how a woman conducts herself and conventional expectations for how she should act—reflects the actual tensions experienced in Peronism regarding the appropriate balance of thinking and feeling in feminine behavior. Certain policy changes and ideologies of the regime created conditions that left women vacillating between incongruous modes of behavior, like those intimated by the protagonist of Los Sueños de Animales. Perón’s enlistment of housewives as key collaborators in his 1951 Economic Emergency Plan—on account of their supposed rational and responsible consumption in comparison to men’s “irrational and self-indulgent spend[ing]”—further confused what constituted permissible behavior rooted in gender differences.^[54] The administration publicly valued women’s foregrounding of reason over feeling, an inversion of the stereotypical conception of women being driven by irrational, emotional thinking while men are steered by rational logic. The “dis-organized” reality Stern presents in multiple Sueños photomontages is fraught with questions of how a woman may behave and what the effects are of transgressing blurred gender boundaries.

The anxieties these tensions incite, specifically the fear of women’s behavior being perceived as masculine, are also recognizable in the composition of Los Sueños de Espejos (Dreams of Mirrors, 1950; Fig. 14). Rest’s dream analysis focuses on the problematics of aging, although that is not definitively what Stern depicts. In the photomontage, a young woman recoils from what appears to be her own masculinized reflection in the handheld mirror she holds before her. Her face is aghast, as if she does not recognize the person returning her gaze. With neither the original Idilio reader’s dream text nor commentary from Stern available for comparative analysis, we can perhaps discern that the work comments on the importance of youth as a central criterion for feminine beauty.[55] This artwork, however, is also particularly interesting in light of Eva’s right-winged rhetoric against the “old” feminists, or the leftist women who advocated for suffrage in the pre-Peronist era.^[56] Plotkin explains that Eva frequently characterized the preceding women’s movement’s approach as a fight against men, in which feminists sought to “turn women into men” in order to assume power.^[57] Rather than threatening the male position, Eva explicitly differentiated the Peronist feminists’ objectives by framing their quest for political rights as a collaboration with men that would allow women to better perform their supportive roles. In this regard, the masculinized female figure in Los Sueños de Espejos not only risks the stigmatization of not complying with conventional standards of femininity, but from the Peronist perspective, her patriotism is also compromised.

Still another aspect of Peronist life confounded the parameters of behavior and roles permitted to the modern Argentine woman: women’s waged work. In her analysis of the conditions of female employees in the Argentine meatpacking industry in the middle of the twentieth century, historian Mirta Zaida Lobato positions the factory as another site of conflicted gender dynamics. She explains that women engaged in paid labor outside the home only “out of [financial] necessity,” and that the work they performed was distinctly coded as feminine and characterized by the domestic skillset it required. The reasons for these circumstances were twofold. In what may be regarded as compensatory strategies to dignify her labor, the female industrial worker—who did not work outside the home by choice and performed duties such as fat trimming, packaging, and cleaning—simultaneously preserved her “sense of herself as a woman” and mitigated the emasculating effect that her paid labor had on her husband and other men in the factory.^[58] Women’s assumption of traditionally male-coded behavior was not only transgressive but also induced anxiety for both groups. It implies a resistance to hybrid male-female behavioral traits, such as those staged in the imagery of Los Sueños de Animales and Los Sueños de Espejos.

These two instances of the women workers and the economically responsible housewives evince the complex and contradictory nature of Peronist gender ideology, which is repeatedly expressed in Sueños. The attendant, internal conflicts experienced by readers of Idilio are made visible in many of the scenes discussed thus far. Even more, however, the sense of possessing irreconcilable parts within oneself becomes quite explicit in the photomontages that portray the process of unhinging or division into conflicting parts, such as the split mother of Los Sueños de Desdoblamiento or the aggressively bisected portrait of a woman in Los Sueños de Disconformidad (Dreams of Disagreement, 1950; Fig. 15). The Peronist women in Stern’s montages are portrayed as being on the cusp between conservative and progressive societal standards. Rather than offering pictures of utopian alternatives, the artist articulates, and expresses criticism toward, the female subject’s uncertain position at the crux of changing social politics.

 

Endnotes

^[1] Katharina Schembs, “Education Through Images: Peronist Visual Propaganda between Innovation and Tradition (Argentina 1946–1955),” Paedagogica Historica 49, no. 1 (2013), 90–91. For a brief but thorough review of the political climate, see Alejandro Dagfal, “Psychoanalysis in Argentina under Peronism and Anti-Peronism (1943–1963)” in Psychoanalysis and Politics: Histories of Psychoanalysis under Conditions of Restricted Political Freedom, ed. Joy Damousi and Mariano Ben Plotkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 139–141.

^[2] See Marifran Carlson, ¡Feminismo!: The Woman’s Movement in Argentina (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005); Sandra McGee Deutsch, “Gender and Sociopolitical Change in Twentieth-Century Latin America,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 71, no. 2 (1991), 259–306;  Oscar Chamosa and Matthew B Karush, eds., The New Cultural History of Peronism: Power and Identity in Mid-Twentieth-Century Argentina (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010);  Asunción Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); and Mariano Ben Plotkin, Mañana Es San Perón: A Cultural History of Perón’s Argentina (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003).

^[3] Iliana Cepero, “Photographic Propaganda under Peronism, 1946–55: Selections from the Archivo General de La Nación Argentina,” History of Photography 40, no. 2 (2016), 213.

For example, Mariano Ben Plotkin states: “One of the tensions permeating various aspects of the Peronist discourse . . . was the polarity between modernity and traditionalism. Peronism presented itself simultaneously as a complete and revolutionary rupture with the past and a conservative force preserving the most traditional national values.” Plotkin, Mañana, 197.

^[4] Mariano Ben Plotkin, Freud in the Pampas: The Emergence and Development of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 38–43. In Buenos Aires, psychoanalysis was codified as a specialized area of study with the founding of the Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina (Argentinian Psychoanalytic Association) in 1942. However, its diffusion in mainstream society had begun in the 1920s when popular periodical publications introduced discussions of it. Plotkin, “Tell Me Your Dreams: Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture in Buenos Aires, 1930–1950,” The Americas 55, no. 4 (1999): 602.

^[5] Plotkin’s original analysis was made prior to Priamo’s catalogue. Luis Priamo, ed., Sueños: Fotomontajes de Grete Stern, Serie Completa (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Fundación CEPPA, 2003); David William Foster, “Dreaming in Feminine: Grete Stern’s Photomontages and the Parody of Psychoanalysis” in Argentine, Mexican, and Guatemalan Photography: Feminist, Queer, and Post-Masculinist Perspectives (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 1–17; Ana María León, “Modern Architecture Will Help You,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 9, no. 1 (2016): 14–39; Plotkin, “Tell Me Your Dreams”;  Kay M. Sibbald, “Through a Glass Darkly: Techniques of Feminist Irony in Grete Stern’s ‘Sueños,’ ” Hispanic Journal 26, no. 1/2 (2005): 243–58; Alejandra Uslenghi, “A Migrant Modernism. Grete Stern’s Photomontages,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 24, no. 2 (2015): 173–205.

There has been increased critical attention to Stern’s work since the Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition in 2015; see Roxana Marcoci and Sarah Meister, eds., From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2015). Key sources from the vast amount of Spanish-language scholarship include Luis Priamo, “Notas sobre los Sueños de Grete Stern” and Hugo Vezzetti, “El psicoanálisis y los sueños en Idilio,” both in Priamo, Sueños, 15–28 and 148–159. See also Paula Bertúa, La cámara en el umbral de lo sensible: Grete Stern y la revista Idilio (1948–1951) (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2012).

^[6] Luis Priamo, “Grete Stern’s Work in Argentina,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 24, no. 2 (Apr. 2015), 92–94.

^[7] Maud Lavin, Clean New World: Culture, Politics, and Graphic Design (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 50. Also see Priamo, “Stern’s Work,” 94; and Roxana Marcoci, “Photographer Against the Grain: Through the Lens of Grete Stern,” in Marcoci and Meister, From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires, 25.

^[8] Lavin, Clean New World, 59.

^[9] Lavin, 51. Priamo also states as much: “The photographs of ringl + pit were subtly ironic towards the acceptable and desirable image of femininity as imposed by dominant values and as exalted in regular advertising, thereby undermining the fetishizing verisimilitude of commercial publicity.” Priamo, “Stern’s Work,” 94.

^[10] Lavin, 51.

^[11] Priamo, “Stern’s Work,” 92.

^[12] Priamo, 91–92. He cites the exhibition pamphlet that Stern and Coppola published for the Sur exhibition in 1935. This document is published in English in Marcoci and Meister, From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires, 236. For more detailed discussion of this show and its (limited) reception at the time, see Marcoci, “Photographer Against the Grain,” 29–30.

^[13] Priamo, “Grete Stern’s Work in Argentina,” 96.

^[14] Others include the Milanese magazine Campo Gráfico (1937) and Coppola’s book Buenos Aires (1937). See Jodi Roberts, “Common Convictions: Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern in Buenos Aires, 1935–1943,” in Marcoci and Meister, From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires, 218–221.

^[15] Priamo, “Stern’s Work,” 99. For an overview of Stern’s activity in Buenos Aires between 1937 and 1943, see Roberts, “Common Convictions.”

^[16] Vezzetti, “El psicoanálisis,” 153, and Plotkin, “Tell Me Your Dreams,” 619.

^[17] Vezzetti, 153.

^[18] Plotkin, “Tell Me Your Dreams,” 624, and Sibbald, “Through a Glass Darkly,” 246.

^[19] For a discussion of the mechanics of the column, see Vezzetti, “El psicoanálisis,” 153; Plotkin, “Tell Me Your Dreams,” 620–621; and Priamo, “Stern’s Work,” 100.

^[20] Vezzetti, 153.

^[21] Priamo, “Stern’s Work,” 101. The artist gives similar account of working process in Grete Stern, “Notes on Photomontage,” trans. Alejandra Uslenghi and Natalia Brizuela, in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 24, no. 2 (2015): 269. For the dynamics between Butelman, Germani, and Stern, also see Plotkin, “Tell Me Your Dreams,” 623, and Marcoci, “Photographer Against the Grain,” 34.

^[22] Foster, “Dreaming in Feminine,” 3. Foster’s analysis informed my discussion of the Sueños series at large.

^[23] For the full dream interpretation texts, see Priamo, Sueños, 113–147.

^[24] Uslenghi, “Migrant Modernism,” 190.

^[25] Priamo, “Stern’s Work.”

^[26] The original commission was for photographs, but Stern chose photomontage. Stern, “Notes on Photomontage,” 269.

^[27] Stern, 273.

^[28] These are the artist’s own words from “Notes on Photomontage,” 269. All in all, it is a process of deliberate alienation, which German cultural historian Patrizia McBride describes as follows: “Montage hinges on yanking elements out of their trusted environments and inserting them into new context. It thus deploys them as signs that acquire new valences depending on the relations they enter with surrounding objects.” The implications of this perspective are that photomontage poses important questions of credibility, malleability of meaning, and the relativism of signification. McBride, “Weimar-Era Montage: Perception, Expression, Storytelling,” in Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany: The Chatter of the Visible (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 15. 

^[29] Matthew Teitelbaum, ed., Montage and Modern Life, 1919–1942 (Cambridge, Mass. and Boston: MIT Press and Institute of Contemporary Art, 1992), 8.

^[30] Uslenghi also observes that the title is a double entendre, in that the artwork can be regarded as a depiction of psychological condensation, but also as a conceptualization of the montage technique. In both instances, multiple disparate elements are synthesized. Uslenghi, “Migrant Modernism,” 198. On the process of condensation in dreams, see Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2010), 296–298.

^[31] For the original text by Professor Richard Rest that accompanied Los Sueños de Condensación, see Priamo, Sueños, 129.

^[32] Uslenghi, “Migrant Modernism,” 199.

^[33] Uslenghi, 199.

^[34] Plotkin, Mañana, 167. To head the new Women’s Division at the Secretariat of Labor, Perón even put three women in public positions of power: Lucila Gregorio Lavie, Haydee Longoni, and Maria Tizon. Plotkin recounts that, upon creating the division, Perón “promised that if he were president women of all classes would be recognized as first class citizens.” Plotkin, 186.

^[35] Plotkin, 167.

^[36] Plotkin, 179, and Carlson, ¡Feminismo!, 192.

^[37] Carlson, 192.

^[38] Maria Damilakou, Mirta Zaida Lobato, and Lizel Tornay, “Working-Class Beauty Queens Under Peronism,” trans. Beatrice D. Gurwitz, in The New Cultural History of Peronism, 171–207.

^[39] Plotkin, Mañana, 179.

^[40] Carlson, ¡Feminismo!, 190–191.

^[41] Carlson, 189, 190, 193, and 196, and Plotkin, Mañana, 179.

^[42] Plotkin, 132 and 179.

^[43] Plotkin, 165, 176, and 183.

^[44] Deutsch, “Gender and Sociopolitical Change,” 276.

^[45] Eva Perón, Mundo Peronista 1 (May 1951). Quoted in Plotkin, Mañana, 180.

^[46] Plotkin, Mañana, 165.

^[47] Eva Perón, “Eva Perón habla a los gobernadores de provincias y territorios nacionales” (1950), HUPC. Quoted in Plotkin, Mañana, 165.

^[48] Dawn Ades, Photomontage (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 66.

^[49] For an interesting comparative analysis of divergent, gendered interpretation of the dreams between Rest and Stern, see Sibbald, “Through a Glass Darkly,” 246–248.

^[50] The interpretive text by Professor Richard Rest reads: “Su vida actual—simbolizada por su habitación—ya le queda chica.” (“Her current life—symbolized by her room—fits a girl.”) My translation. For the full original text, see Priamo, Sueños, 133–34.

^[51] Foster, “Dreaming in Feminine,” 9.

^[52] The interpretive text by Professor Richard Rest reads: “Mujer acostumbrada a reprimir todo lo sentimental, a someterlo todo a la ‘razón’, se ve ahora enfrentada a una verdadera ‘rebelión’ de su inconsciente. Hela aquí—en el sueño—luchando desesperadamente contra la fuerza arrolladora de un león, contra toda la fuerza emocional que había rechazado, reprimido, y que ahora, al promediar su vida, está por irrumpir amenazadora en su conciencia.” (“The woman is accustomed to repressing everything sentimental, to submitting everything to ‘reason,’ and is now faced with a true ‘rebellion’ of her unconscious. Here it is—in the dream—fighting desperately against the overwhelming force of a lion, against all the emotional force that it had rejected, repressed, and that now, in the midst of its life, is about to burst threateningly into its consciousness.”) My translation. For the full original text, see Priamo, Sueños, 115.

^[53] My translation. For the full original text, see Priamo, Sueños, 115.

^[54] Natalia Milanesio, “The Guardian Angels of the Domestic Economy: Housewives’ Responsible Consumption in Peronist Argentina,” Journal of Women’s History 18, no. 3 (2006): 93–94.

^[55] Damilakou, Lobato, and Tornay, “Working-Class Beauty Queens,” 186.

^[56] For an overview of the preceding women’s movement, see Chapter 8, “Women’s Politics and Suffrage in Argentina,” in Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social Change, 257–285.

^[57] Plotkin, Mañana, 174.

^[58] Mirta Zaida Lobato, “Women Workers in the ‘Cathedrals of Corned Beef’: Structure and Subjectivity in The Argentine Meatpacking Industry,” in The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers: From Household and Factory to the Union Hall and Ballot Box, eds. John D. French and Daniel James (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 58–61.

Author Bio:

Amelia Russo is a recent graduate of the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, where she received her MA in art history. Her current research interests range from labor dynamics in exhibition-making to the intersections of American art and physics in the 1960s. Since receiving her BA in art history from Colorado College in 2011, Amelia has worked at the Aspen Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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