Sueño No. 1: Artículos eléctricos para el hogar (Dream No. 1: Electrical Appliances for the Home) by Grete Stern stood out to me from the Lehigh University Art Galleries collection (LUAG). It is a gelatin silver print photograph, given to LUAG by Jose A. Navarrete as a gift. The elegant female figure as part of the lamp stand looks romantic and bizarre to me, and makes me want to do a deeper delve into the artists’ life and oeuvre.
Grete Stern was a German-Argentina female photographer. She was born in German in 1904. Grete started her career as a graphic designer and developed interests in photography under the influences of two American photographers Edward Weston and Paul Outerbridge. She learned photography from Walter Peterhans and then became a professional photographer. She spent early life in her photography and design studio ringl+pit in Germany and then moved to Argentina with her husband in her 30s. Grete began working for a women’s magazine Idilio in the late 1940s. She taught photography at the National University of the Northeast from 1959 to 1985. Grete died in 1999 at the age of 95.
Grete produced her famous Sueño series for Idilio from 1948 to 1951. She encouraged her readers to submit their dreams and she made photomontages based on surreal interpretation on the dreams.
This photograph on gelatin silver print was taken in 1949. It is one of the 150 photomontages from the Sueño series. Despite the victory of the women’s suffrage movement in Argentina in 1947, the media tended to focus on a woman’s role at home during this period. Opposite to the musculine thoughts in the Idilio magazine, Grete’s photomontages subtly pushed back on the traditional idea of patriarchy.
In the foreground of the photo is a beautiful mini Argentina woman who is half kneeling on a lamp base, as if she is part of the lamp column. A man’s large hand is pressing the button of the lamp right next to her. Maybe it is her husband who is controlling the lamp. The woman is wearing beautiful makeup and has a soft on her face. Her body in the elegant long gown forms an S curve. The huge floral lamp shade shelters her in and sets off her slim, fragile figure. She is more like a pretty doll, an exquisite art piece, rather than a real woman. As the name “Electrical Appliances for the Home” suggests, in her husband’s perspective, a wife is like a beautiful decoration for him, a household object with simple function, or a puppet that he could easily control with a button.
What is interesting is that the woman is in an uncomfortable twisted gesture. As her husband is pressing the button, the woman is in the motion of standing up. Her left leg is from kneeling to standing up and her body is twisted as if there is a force fixing her upper body to the lamp and preventing her from standing up.
Looking at the top of the figure, the woman’s eyes are looking to the side with a hint of boredom and tiredness. Maybe she is tired of the protection of the lamp and the control of her husband, and maybe she is curious about the outside world. The woman’s right hand is holding the lamp, in a gesture that people do to protect their head when they are coming out of a low door. It seems that she is doing so before coming out of the lamp. Part of her hair and her left hand is hidden behind the lamp, leaving us space to guess: is her left hand chained onto the lamp? Is her hair tied up to the lamp and her hand is untying it? It makes me wonder if the lamp is more of a protection or a prison.
There is a similar subject in The Awakening Conscience by William Holman Hunt. In the painting, a young mistress with her eyes full of hope, is breaking free from the man’s arm, a dramatic moment of feminine awakening. Grete’s photomontage is much more subtle. At first glance, it seems that Grete is objectifying women: an ideal wife should be beautiful, obedient to her husband, and lack independence and autonomy. However, Grete inserts subtle feminist critique of such value through the details of the painting — the eyes looking to the side, the arm untying her hair, the legs trying to stand up — all indicates the feminism is awakening. Grete is making the metaphor here: a woman can be tied up physically, confined to a relationship or the oppressive patriarchal regime, but she could have a free mind and fight her way through to gain independence.
Some hidden metaphors in both paintings add complications to the thesis. In The Awakening Conscience, a cat is playing with a bird at the lower left corner, implying the young woman’s fate may still be in control of the man. Similar to the symbolism in William’s painting, the man’s hand pressing the button in the photo is worth pondering: Is the woman really able to leave and achieve independence of her own will? Or is she only able to stand up when her husband presses the button, and is she only allowed to have “freedom” under her husband’s permission? After all, it is the epitome of the feminism movement in 1949 in Argentina. A woman’s fight is not just between her and her husband. It is a small group of awakening feminists against the huge hand of patriarchal society.
Even as of today, feminism and equality are never the women’s own fight. They require the efforts of both genders.
Citation:
Grete Stern, German – Argentine, 1904 – 1999. Sueño No. 1 “Artículos Eléctricos Para El Hogar” de la serie “Sueños-Fotomontajes”. 1949. Artstor, library.artstor.org/asset/28121322
Michelotti, Graciela. Review of The Women’s Suffrage Movement and Feminism in Argentina from Roca to Perón, by Gregory Hammond. The Americas, vol. 70 no. 2, 2013, p. 319-320. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/tam.2013.0109.
Rexer, Lyle. “GRETE IN DREAMLAND: The Photomontages of Grete Stern.” Aperture, no. 187, 2007, pp. 60–67. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24473257. Accessed 22 Oct. 2020.
Sibbald, K. M. “Through a Glass Darkly: Techniques of Feminist Irony in Grete Stern’s ‘Sueños.’” Hispanic Journal, vol. 26, no. 1/2, 2005, pp. 243–258. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44284793. Accessed 22 Oct. 2020.
William Holman Hunt, United Kingdom, 1827 – 1910. “The Awakening Conscience”. 1853. Oil on canvas. Tate Collection, London
Two minor comments, a gelatin silver print is a photograph, not a painting technique. It is an early process for black and white prints. So you refer to it as a photograph, or as a gelatin silver print, or even as a gelatin print. They are interchangable.