VIENNA.- The photographer Tina Modotti, who was born in 1896 in Udine, Italy and died in 1942 in Mexico, was one of the most fascinating women of the 20th century. She became famous as a result of the photographs she created in Mexico in the 1920s and her involvement in the revolutionary movements of her time.
Artist: Tina Modotti (1896-1942) synthesised the aesthetics of modernist photography with a Marxist belief in history. She lived in Stalin’s USSR, took part in the Spanish civil war, and was finally, some say, assassinated by one of Stalin’s agents (or perhaps she really did die of a heart attack) in Mexico City...
Pino Cacucci, Tina Modotti: A Life. Translated by Patricia J. Duncan. St. Martin’s Press, 224 pages, 24.95
Tina Modotti (1896-1942), Hilton Kramer wrote in The New York Times, was once known as “Edward Weston’s mistress...
Devotees of communism evoke a grim picture of stern and ascetic men and women in sparsely furnished rooms, free of bourgeois luxuries. And then there is the glamorous Tina Modotti, an Italian photographer and political revolutionary. An exhibition of 35 of her photographs now on at New York’s Throckmorton Fine Art gallery, “
A biographer uncovers new material on the Italian-born photographer, actress, revolutionary and spy.
By Sarah Coleman
In Edward Weston’s photographs of the Italian beauty Tina Modotti, the subject assumes various identities....
