Tina Modotti | |
|---|---|
 Tina Modotti photographed byEdward Weston in 1921 | |
| Born | Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti Mondini August 16/17, 1896 |
| Died | January 5, 1942 (aged 45) |
| Nationality | Italian, |
| Known for | Photography |
| Partner(s) | Roubaix de l'Abrie Richey (1918–1922, his death) Edward Weston (1921–1927) |
Tina Modotti (bornAssunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti Mondini, August 16/17, 1896 – January 5, 1942) was anItalian American photographer, model, actor, andrevolutionary political activist for theComintern.[1][2][3] She left her native Italy in 1913 and emigrated to the United States, where she settled in San Francisco with her father and sister.[4] In San Francisco, Modotti worked as a seamstress, model, and theater performer and, later, moved to Los Angeles where she worked in film. She later became a photographer and essayist. In 1922 she moved toMexico, where she became an active member of theMexican Communist Party.[5]
Modotti was born Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti Mondini inUdine,Friuli, Italy.[6] Her mother, Assunta, was a seamstress; her father, Giuseppe, was a mason.[7] After spending time living in Austria, where her parents were migrant workers, the family returned to Udine, where the young Modotti worked in a textile factory.[8] In 1913, at the age of 16, she emigrated to the United States to join her father in San Francisco, California.[6] Departing from Genoa aboard theSSMoltke on June 24, she traveled alone, according to Letizia Argenteri, author ofTina Modotti: Between Art and Revolution, arriving on July 8 atEllis Island, where she "declared herself to be single, five feet one inch tall, in good mental and physical health, and a student." She carried with her "100 dollars and a train ticket for San Francisco, where her father and her sister Mercedes resided."[9]
Attracted to the performing arts supported by the Italian émigré community in theSan Francisco Bay Area, Modotti experimented with acting.[10] She appeared in several plays, operas, andsilent movies in the late 1910s and early 1920s, and also worked as an artist's model.[11][12]
In 1917, she met Roubaix "Robo" de l'Abrie Richey.[7] Originally a farm boy fromOregon named Ruby Ritchie, the artist and poet assumed the more bohemian name Roubaix. In 1918, Modotti began a romantic relationship with him and moved with him to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the motion picture industry.[7] Although the couple cohabited and lived as a "married couple", they were not married. She was listed as a U.S. citizen in the 1920 Los Angeles township census.[13] Often playing thefemme fatale, Modotti's movie career culminated in the 1920 filmThe Tiger's Coat. She had minor parts in two other films.[11]
The couple entered into abohemian circle of friends. One of these fellow bohemians was Ricardo Gómez Robelo. Another was the photographer,Edward Weston.
As a young girl in Italy her uncle, Pietro Modotti, maintained a photography studio. Later in the U.S., her father briefly ran a similar studio in San Francisco. While in Los Angeles, she met the photographer Edward Weston and his creative partnerMargrethe Mather. It was through her relationship with Weston that Modotti developed as an important fine art photographer and documentarian. By 1921, Modotti was Weston's lover.[7] Ricardo Gómez Robelo became the head of Mexico's Ministry of Education's Fine Arts Department, and persuaded Robo to come to Mexico with a promise of a job and a studio.
Robo left for Mexico in December 1921.[7] Perhaps unaware of his affair with Modotti, Robo took with him prints of Weston's, hoping to mount an exhibition of his and Weston's work in Mexico. While she was on her way to be with Robo, Modotti received word of his death fromsmallpox on February 9, 1922.[7] Devastated, she arrived two days after his death. In March 1922, determined to see Robo's vision realized, she mounted a two-week exhibition of Robo's and Weston's work at theNational Academy of Fine Arts in Mexico City. She sustained a second loss with the death of her father, which forced her to return to San Francisco later in March 1922. In 1923, Modotti returned to Mexico City with Weston and his son Chandler, leaving behind Weston's wife Flora and their youngest three children.[14] She agreed to run Weston's studio free of charge in return for his mentoring her in photography.[15]
Together they opened a portrait studio in Mexico City. Modotti and Weston quickly gravitated toward the capital's bohemian scene and used their connections to create an expanding portrait business. Together they found a community of cultural and political "avant-gardists", which includedFrida Kahlo,Lupe Marín,Diego Rivera, andJean Charlot.[16] In general, Weston was moved by the landscape and folk art of Mexico to create abstract works, while Modotti was more captivated by the people of Mexico and blended this human interest with a modernist aesthetic, all the while shunning the term 'artist', insisting she merely wanted to "capture social realities".[17] Modotti also became the photographer of choice for the blossomingMexican mural movement, documenting the works ofJosé Clemente Orozco andDiego Rivera.[18] Between 1924 and 1928, Modotti took hundreds of photographs of Rivera's murals at theSecretariat of Public Education in Mexico City.[19] Modotti's visual vocabulary matured during this period, such as her formal experiments with architectural interiors, blooming flowers, urban landscapes, and especially in her many beautiful images of peasants and workers during the depression. In 1926, Modotti and Weston were commissioned byAnita Brenner to travel around Mexico and take photographs for what would become her influential bookIdols Behind Altars.[16] The relative contributions of Modotti and Weston to the project has been debated. Weston's son Brett, who accompanied the two on the project, indicated that the photographs were taken by Edward Weston.
In 1925, Modotti joinedInternational Red Aid, aCommunist organization.[16] In November 1926, Weston left Mexico and returned to California.[14] During this time Modotti met several political radicals and Communists, including threeMexican Communist Party leaders who would all eventually become romantically linked with her:Xavier Guerrero,Julio Antonio Mella, andVittorio Vidali.
Starting in 1927, a much more politically active Modotti (she joined the Mexican Communist Party that year) found her focus shifting and more of her work becoming politically motivated.[20] Around that time her photographs began appearing in publications such asMexican Folkways,Forma, and the more radically motivatedEl Machete, theGerman Communist Party'sArbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ), andNew Masses.[11] From 1929 she contributed toDer Kuckuck, a publication of theAustrian Social Democratic Party.[21]
Mexican photographerManuel Álvarez Bravo divided Modotti's career as a photographer into two distinct categories: "Romantic" and "Revolutionary", with the former period including her time spent as Weston's darkroom assistant, office manager and, finally, creative partner. Her later works were the focus of herone-woman retrospective exhibition at theNational Library in December 1929, which was advertised as "The First Revolutionary Photographic Exhibition In Mexico".
Modotti began a relationship with Xavier Guerrero, who was a member of the Mexican Communist Party, in 1927.[22] Guerrero was sent to Moscow for a year to take part in political party training, and by 1928 Modotti had met and begun a relationship with the exiled Cuban activist Julio Antonio Mella.[22] During this same period, economic and political conflicts within Mexico and indeed much of Central and South America were intensifying and this included increased repression of political dissidents. In 1929, Mella was assassinated while walking in the street with Modotti from the offices of Red Aid, a Comintern-attached organization that offered relief to and defended victims of political repression.[17][22] Modotti was immediately arrested, but later released and cleared of his murder.[22] Shortly thereafter, an attempt was made on the life of the Mexican PresidentPascual Ortiz Rubio. Modotti – who was a target of both the Mexican and Italian political police[23] — was questioned about both crimes amidst a concerted anti-communist, anti-immigrant press campaign, that depicted "the fierce and bloody Tina Modotti" as the perpetrator (a Catholic zealot, Daniel Luis Flores, was later charged with shooting Ortiz Rubio. José Magriñat was arrested for Mella's murder).[23][24]
As a result of the anti-communist campaign by the Mexican government, Modotti was exiled from Mexico in 1930.[22] She first spent several months inBerlin, followed by several years in Moscow.[22] Traveling on a restricted visa that mandated her final destination as Italy, Modotti initially stopped in Berlin and from there visited Switzerland. The Italian government made concerted efforts to extradite her as a subversive national, but with the assistance ofInternational Red Aid activists, she evaded detention by the fascist police. She apparently intended to make her way into Italy to join the anti-fascist resistance there. In response to the deteriorating political situation in Germany and her own exhausted resources, however, she followed the advice of Vittorio Vidali and moved to Moscow in 1931.[23] After 1931, Modotti no longer photographed. Reports of later photographs are unsubstantiated.
During the next few years she engaged in various missions on behalf of theWorkers International Relief organizations as aComintern agent in Europe. When theSpanish Civil War erupted in 1936, Vidali (then known as "Comandante Carlos") and Modotti (using the pseudonym "Maria") left Moscow for Spain, where they stayed and worked until 1939. She worked with CanadianDr. Norman Bethune during the disastrous retreat fromMálaga in 1937. In 1939, following the collapse of the Republican movement in Spain, Modotti left Spain with Vidali and returned to Mexico under apseudonym.[22]
In 1942, at the age of 45, Modotti died from heart failure while on her way home in a taxi from a dinner atHannes Meyer's[25] home inMexico City, under what are viewed by some[26] as suspicious circumstances.[7] After hearing about her death,Diego Rivera suggested that Vidali had orchestrated it. Modotti may have 'known too much' about Vidali's activities in Spain, which included a rumoured 400 executions. An autopsy showed that she died of natural causes, namelycongestive heart failure.[7] Her grave is located within the vastPanteón de Dolores in Mexico City. PoetPablo Neruda composed Modotti's epitaph, part of which can also be found on her tombstone, which also includes a relief portrait of Modotti by engraverLeopoldo Méndez:
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In 1996 thePhiladelphia Museum of Art organized a large-scale retrospective dedicated to the artist, entitledTina Modotti: Photographs.[30] Martha Chahroudi, the museum's curator of photography, organized the exhibition. To raise funds for the show, the singerMadonna auctioned her 1963 Mercedes-Benz. Madonna has become a major collector of Modotti's work. In 2006, theSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized an exhibition entitledMexico as Muse: Tina Modotti and Edward Weston.[31]
Prior to the presentation of her work in the U.S., Modotti's photographs have been shown in Italy, Poland, Germany, Austria, and other countries. In 2010, the largest exhibition of her work,Tina Modotti Photographer and Revolutionary opened at theKunstHausWien in Vienna, Austria.[32] It presented 250 photographs, many never shown before. The exhibition is based on the collections of Galerie Bilderwelt, Berlin and Spencer Throckmorton, NYC and curated by Reinhard Schultz. In 2015 the exhibitionTina Modotti: Photographs of Mexican Murals was organized at the Richard Norton Gallery.[15] The State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSPHOTO in Saint Petersburg, Russia, organized an exhibition of Modotti's work entitled "Tina Modotti. Art. Love. Revolution" from 20 September 2019 to 18 November 2019.[33] In Italy, Palazzo Ducale in Genoa organized the exhibition "Donne, Messico e Libertà" from 8 April 2022 to 9 October 2022.[34]
Modotti's work is held in the following permanent collections:
Modotti was portrayed byAshley Judd in the 2002 filmFrida, about fellow artistFrida Kahlo.[41] 2018 announcement by AG Studios, England to make a TV mini-series titledRadical Eye: The Life and Times of Tina Modotti, creatively helmed by Paula Alvarez Vaccaro and starringMonica Bellucci.[42]
Google Doodles honored Modotti on what would have been her 121st birthday, showing on August 16, 2017. The doodle appears on Mexico'sGoogle webpage.[43]
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