Grete Stern
Botella del mar (Sueño Nº 5)

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Images(2)

Artist Grete Stern (Argentinean, born Germany, 1904–1999)Argentinean, born Germany, 1904–1999

CultureArgentinean

Titles

Botella del mar (Sueño Nº 5)

Date1949, printed 1993

PlaceBuenos Aires, Argentina

MediumGelatin silver print, photomontage

DimensionsImage: 9 3/8 × 11 5/8 in. (23.9 × 29.5 cm)
Sheet: 9 3/8 × 11 5/8 in. (23.9 × 29.5 cm)

Credit LineGift of Joan Morganstern

Object number94.760

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Special Collections

Photographs by Latin American Artists

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionOne of the Bauhaus school’s best-known alumnae, Grete Stern, had cofounded the Berlin studio foto ringl + pit, and begun producing imaginative commercial photomontages. After moving to Buenos Aires with her Argentinian husband, Horacio Coppola, in 1935, Stern continued her successful vocation. Finding that the innovative visual effects that ran through many of her advertising photographs meshed well with the growing bourgeois popularity of psychoanalysis, Stern undertook an extraordinary project for the women’s magazine Idilio. From 1948 to 1951, she created photomontages based on reports of dreams submitted by the magazine’s readers. Accompanying the weekly column “El psicoanálisis le ayuderá” (“Psychoanalysis Will Help You”), Stern’s images distilled middle-class anxieties into striking representations, often lampooning the links between sexual desire and commodity culture that were at the core of much advertising photography. In one installment, Sea in a Bottle (No. 5), a woman wishes to shrink her size, and be placed in a glass bottle, wanting to travel the seas, possibly reflecting a young woman’s desire to get away from her everyday reality.
ProvenanceJoan Morgenstern, Houston; given to MFAH, 1994.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

in pencil, center, verso: Sueño No 5 "Bodella del Mar" de la serie "Sueñes-Fotomontajes"Buenos Aires

Signed and dated in pencil with artist's stamp, center, verso:1949 Printed 1993 Foto Grete Stern

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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