Tina Modotti
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encyclopedia)
Tina Modotti (August 16 (or 17) 1896 –
January 5, 1942) was an Italian photographer, model, actress, and
revolutionary political activist.
She was born Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti Mondini in Udine, Friuli. In
1913, at the age of 16, she immigrated to the United States to join her
father in San Francisco.
Attracted to the performing arts supported by the Italian emigre community
in the Bay Area, Modotti experimented with acting. She appeared in several
plays, operas and silent movies in the late 1910s and early 1920s, and
also worked as an artist's model.
In 1918, she married Roubaix "Robo" de l'Abrie Richey and moved with him
to Los Angeles in order to pursue a career in the motion picture industry.
There she met the photographer Edward Weston and his assistant Margrethe
Mather. By 1921, Modotti was Weston's favorite model and, by October of
that year, his lover. Modotti's husband Robo seems to have responded to
this by moving to Mexico in 1921. Following him to Mexico City, Modotti
arrived two days after his death from smallpox on February 9, 1922. In
1923, Modotti returned to Mexico City with Weston and his son Chandler,
leaving behind Weston's wife and remaining three children.
Edward Weston's 1923 portrait of Tina ModottiModotti and Weston quickly
gravitated toward the capital's bohemian scene, and used their connections
to create an expanding portrait business. It was also during this time
that Modotti met several political radicals and Communists, including
three Mexican Communist Party leaders who would all eventually become
romantically linked with Modotti: Xavier Guerrero, Julio Antonio Mella,
and Vittorio Vidali.
By 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. Around that period, her photographs began
appearing in publications such as Mexican Folkways, Forma, and the more
radically motivated El Machete, Arbiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ), and
New Masses.
Some have suggested that Modotti was introduced to photography as a young
girl in Italy, where her uncle, Pietro Modotti, maintained a photography
studio. Later in the U.S., her father briefly ran a similar studio in San
Francisco. However, it was through her relationship with Edward Weston
that Modotti rapidly developed as an important fine art photographer and
documentarian. Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo divided Modotti’s
career as a photographer into two distinct categories: "Romantic" and
"Revolutionary." The former period includes her time spent as Weston’s
darkroom assistant, office manager and, finally, creative partner.
Together they opened a portrait studio in Mexico City and were
commissioned to travel around Mexico taking photographs for Anita
Brenner’s book, "Idols Behind Altars."
In Mexico, Modotti found a community of cultural and political avant
guardists. She became the photographer of choice for the blossoming
Mexican mural movement, documenting the works of José Clemente Orozco and
Diego Rivera. Her visual vocabulary matured during this period, such as
her formal experiments with architectural interiors, flowers and urban
landscapes, and especially in her many lyrical images of peasants and
workers. Indeed, her one-woman retrospective exhibition at the National
Library in December 1929 was advertised as "The First Revolutionary
Photographic Exhibition In Mexico." She had reached a high point in her
career as a photographer, but within the next year she was forced to set
her camera aside in favor of more pressing concerns.
During this same period, economic and political contradictions within
Mexico and indeed much of Central and South America were intensifying and
this included increased repression of political dissidents. On January 10,
1929, Modotti's comrade and companion Julio Antonio Mella was
assassinated, ostensibly by agents of the Cuban government. Shortly
thereafter an attempt was made on the Mexican President Pascual Ortiz
Rubio. Modotti — who was a target of both the Mexican and Italian
political police — was questioned about both crimes amidst a concerted
anti-communist, anti-immigrant press campaign, which depicted "the fierce
and bloody Tina Modotti" as the perpetrator. (A Catholic zealot, Daniel
Luis Flores, was later charged with shooting Rubio. José Magriñat was
arrested for Mella's murder.)
As a result of the anti-communist campaign by the Mexican government,
Modotti was expelled from Mexico in February, 1930, and placed under guard
on a ship bound for Rotterdam. The Italian government made concerted
efforts to extradite her as a subversive national, but with the assistance
of International Red Aid activists, she evaded detention by the fascist
police. Traveling on a restricted visa that mandated her final destination
as Italy, Modotti initially stopped in Berlin and from there visited
Switzerland. She apparently intended to make her way into Italy and to
join the anti-fascist resistance there. However, in response to the
deteriorating political situation in Germany and her own exhausted
resources, she followed the advice of Vittorio Vidali and moved to Moscow
in 1931.
During the next few years she engaged in various missions on behalf of the
International Workers' Relief organizations and the Comintern in Europe.
When the Spanish 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 the famed
Canadian Dr. Norman Bethune (who would later invent the mobile blood unit)
during the disastrous retreat from Málaga in 1937. In April 1939,
following the collapse of the Republican movement in Spain, Modotti left
Spain with Vidali and returned to Mexico under a pseudonym.
Modotti died from heart failure in Mexico City in 1942 under what is
viewed by some as suspicious circumstances. 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. Her grave is located within the vast Panteón de
Dolores in Mexico City. Poet Pablo Neruda composed Tina Modotti's epitaph,
part of which can also be found on her tombstone, which also includes a
relief portrait of Modotti by engraver Leopoldo Méndez:
Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life,
bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam,
combined with steel and wire and
pollen to make up your firm
and delicate being.
