Tina in Mexico
 artsworld.com
Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti Mondini - to give her her full name - was born in Italy, and moved with her family to the United States in 1906. Following a series of factory jobs, she found minor success as a theatre and silent film actress, getting married, developing a radical political ideology and moving to Hollywood along the way. Shortly afterwards however, while working on a film in California, she met and had an affair with the photographer Edward Weston, producing a lasting friendship that included her husband, the poet and illustrator Robo de Richey.
After Richey's death in 1921, Modotti and Weston moved to Mexico City in 1923 under the agreement that she would run his studio and household, and he would teach her photography. The country was just emerging from revolution, and both Modotti and Weston found it a vibrant, invigorating and inspiration place to be. As a result of Modotti's vivacity and facility for language, she and Weston soon became part of the avant-garde and counted leading artists and writers, including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Miguel Covarrubias, Jean Charlot and David Alfaro Siqueiros, among their friends.
Weston however, returned to his wife and children in California in 1926, but Modotti was in her element and chose to stay. She established a studio and earned a fine reputation as a photographer, publishing her own images in magazines such as Mexican Folkways and Formas.
In 1927, she joined the Communist party, but, following government surveillance of her highly public connections to the party and its leaders (she was the lover of two leading activists, Cuban communist Julio Antonio Mella and Spanish civil war hero Vittorio Vidali), she was deported from Mexico three years later, after being suspected of a conspiracy to assassinate the president.
She then moved to Berlin and gave up photograophy to work exclusively for the party - it's rumoured as a spy for Stalin - before reporting for the Republican newspaper Ayuda and working for the International Red Cross for a time in France, Russia and Spain. Having fled the rise of Francisco Franco she was in again forced into exile, and while the United States refused her asylum, Mexico allowed her to return, although it's thought she lived under an assumed name. She continued her photography in Mexico, but died shortly after her return - the official version blamed a heart attack, but rumour favoured suicide or foul play - at the age of 45.
Her images however, live on, and - much like the revival of interest in the work of her contemporary, Frida Kahlo - have received much-deserved attention in recent years after a long period of neglect.
Known for her sharply focused portraits, still-lifes, and abstract compositions, Modotti's work combines a sophisticated sense of design with socially and politically orientated subject matter. Her images of the Mexican working classes and Mexican artifacts became powerful revolutionary emblems, and her work is suffused throughout with political purpose, but she never allowed the content to dominate the form or aesthetic theory to undermine meaning. Even in a politically-charged sequence of still lifes consisting of hammers, sickles and bandoleers, the geometry, form and composition of the objects remains the primary focus. When forced to choose between her art and the Communist cause however, she was in no doubt, writing; "I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art".
A sophistocated photographer in her own right, she - again, much like Frida Kahlo - has suffered from the legends that have sprung up around her colourful life and the powerful, artistic men that featured large throughout it. She may still be overshadowed by Edward Weston's fame, but it's evident that she was much more than his talented apprentice. |
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Vallarta Living | Art Talk | December 2006 
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