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Gertrudis Chale

  • Gertrudis Chale was an Austrian painter based in Buenos Aires, where she achieved integration into the local art scene and spent years travelling throughout the region.
  • Gertrudis
  • Chale
  • 1898
  • Vienna (AT)
  • 1954
  • La Rioja (AR)
  • Painter
  • Gertrudis Chale was an Austrian painter based in Buenos Aires, where she achieved integration into the local art scene and spent years travelling throughout the region.

    Word Count: 26

  • Gertrudis Chale, Bocacalle de Sarandí, 1940, tempera, 62 x 74,5 cm. Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires.
  • Gertrudis Chale was an Austrian painter based in Buenos Aires, where she achieved integration into the local art scene and everyday life. She was very interested in the rural areas of Argentina and of Latin America in general and spent many years travelling throughout the region.
    Born in 1898, Chale studied first at the School of Arts and Crafts of Vienna, her home town, and later studied painting at the Heimann school in Munich. In the mid-1920s, she went to Switzerland and then Paris, where she worked as a publicist for advertising companies. At the beginning of the 1930s, she moved from France to Spain to work as an artistic collaborator in a fashion house. She spent a year in the Balearic Islands, dividing her time between Mallorca and Ibiza. She eventually settled in Madrid for more than a year. Because of her Jewish origins, Europe was no longer a safe place and she decided to emigrate to Argentina in 1934.
    In Buenos Aires, Chale settled in the suburb of Quilmes, a neighbourhood in the south of the city, and quickly integrated into the metropolis's artistic and intellectual milieu, joining a group of artists and intellectuals made up of both Europeans and Argentinians. She was part of the group that met regularly at the house of Norah Lange and her husband Oliverio Girondo, both writers. Norah Lange was a friend of Jorge Luis Borges, who in 1924 wrote a preface for her book La calle de la tarde, and with whom she founded Proa magazine in 1922. Grete Stern, Horacio Coppola and Clément Moreau also took part in these meetings. This cosmopolitan circle was very representative of Buenos Aires.
    Chale travelled throughout Argentina, from the northern Andes to Patagonia in the south. She painted strong, sensitive landscapes and the people she met in the villages she stayed in. She also tried to immortalise some of the local traditions in her work. In her writing, she criticised the American phenomenon of "looking towards Europe” and shared the growing desire of her American colleagues to orientate their intellectual approach towards indigenous and local cultural forms. Also, her paintings and drawings explored the suburbs as a liminal space between the two worlds: the urban and the field. For Chale, Quilmes, where she lived, represented this ambiguous space, this in-between. She travelled in many countries in Latin America (Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay). Gertrudis Chale died in 1954, in a plane crash on a return flight from Mendoza to Buenos Aires.

    Word Count: 417

  • Gertrudis Chale, India con collar, oil, 54 x 40 cm. Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires.
    Gertrudis Chale, Indias, 1946, ink on paper, 38 x 29,5 cm. Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires.
    Brughetti Romualdo. "Presentación de Gertrudis Chale." Correo Literario, year II, no. 23, 15 October 1944, p. 4.
  • La hora americana 1910–1950, edited by Roberto Amigo, exh. cat. Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, 2014, https://media.bellasartes.gob.ar/h/Publicaciones/la_hora_americana_catalogo.pdf. Accessed 16 April 2021.

    Neuman, Mauricio. Gertrudis Chale: una pintora en el mundo andino, años 1934–1954 = Gertrudis Chale: painter in the Andean world, years 1934–1954. Latin American Art, 2009.

    Word Count: 53

  • Brughetti, Romualdo. "Presentación de Gertrudis Chale." Correo Literario, year II, no. 23, 15 October 1944, pp. 4–5. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Hemeroteca Digital, http://hemerotecadigital.bne.es/issue.vm?id=0060231224&page=4&search=Gertrudis+Chale&lang=es. Accessed 23 April 2021.

    Brughetti, Romualdo. “América y el arte: diálogo con la pintora Gertrudis Chale.” Cabalgata, vol. 2, no. 9, February 1947, pp. 10–11.

    Vogelmann, David J. “La Argentina de Gertrudis Chale.” Contrapunto, vol. 1, no. 1, December 1944, p. 13. Archivo Histórico de Revistas Argentinas, https://ahira.com.ar/ejemplares/contrapunto-no-1/. Accessed 13 April 2021.

    Word Count: 86

  • Laura Karp Lugo
  • Quilmes, Argentina (1934–1954).

  • Quilmes, Argentina (residence).

  • Buenos Aires
  • Laura Karp Lugo. "Gertrudis Chale." METROMOD Archive, 2021, https://archive.metromod.net/viewer.p/69/2950/object/5138-7556070, last modified: 12-05-2021.
  • Horacio Coppola
    FilmmakerPhotographer
    Buenos Aires

    Born in Buenos Aires, Horacio Coppola is one of the photographers who represent modern photography in Argentina.

    Word Count: 17

    Grete Stern
    Photographer
    Buenos Aires

    Grete Stern is one of the photographers that represent modern photography in Argentina. Her house in Ramos Mejía was a meeting place for local and foreign artists and intellectuals.

    Word Count: 30

    Clément Moreau
    Graphic Artist
    Buenos Aires

    German-born Clément Moreau had to exile to Buenos Aires due to his political activism. There, he was well integrated into the artistic milieu and published his caricatures in many publications.

    Word Count: 31