Retrospective of Photographer Tina Modotti at Kunst Haus Wien
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. The exhibition at KUNST HAUS WIEN offers an overview of significant areas of her photographic work, which has yet to receive the tribute it deserves: her portraits and studies of plants, her images of the revolutionary movement of the 1920s in Mexico, her marionette photographs, her famous series on the “Women of Tehuantepec”, and a selection of little-known vintage prints of photographs that Modotti made of Diego Rivera’s...
Men Reading El Machete, Tina Modotti (1924)
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 in 1942. Modotti was born in Italy, migrated to California, worked as a theatre actor, flirted with Hollywood, travelled to Mexico, stayed, joined the Communist party, and shot brilliant, high-art propaganda/documentary images. She learned her powerful, composed style as apprentice to the American Edward Weston, a pioneer of photography as modern art. The two came to Mexico as lovers; when he returned to California, she stayed. Weston’s...
Tina Modotti: A Life.(Review)
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 and model during his crucial Mexican period, [who] was also an accomplished, if minor, photographer in her own right.” Today, however, she is probably better known than Weston, at least in the universities. Born in Italy, raised in San Francisco, and morally tarnished if not murdered in Mexico, Tina Modotti has become an icon of the academic Left: a kind of junior partner to Frida Kahlo. Unlike Kahlo, she does not bear the cachet of physical handicaps or such extra assets, for a representative of the fabled...
Tina Modotti, viewer and viewed
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, “Tina Modotti: Under the Mexican Sky“, recalls the life and talent of this rare seductress. Modotti was 16 when she left Italy for California, where she began her transformation from factory worker to bohemian ingénue. In Los Angeles, she met and modelled for Edward Weston, a pioneer of photography, who soon became her lover and mentor. He left his wife to be with Modotti, and in the early 1920s they ventured to Mexico, a...
“Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti”
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. An early series, circa 1921, is all soft-focus, shadowy romanticism, emphasizing the model’s heavy eyelids and full mouth, with her slender fingers often reaching out to rest on her chin or shoulder. In sharp contrast is a mid-’20s series of nudes shot in bright daylight, with dark shadows slicing across Modotti’s slim form while she suns herself on a patio. At around the same time, Weston made intense close-ups of Modotti’s face that reveal both her sadness and her strength, endowing her with a kind of monumental...
Diego Rivera and Tina Modotti: political allies and creative collaborators.
In this portrait, made with black chalk on paper, Rivera quickly established the outlines of her head and face, then carefully drew Modotti‘s eyes, nose, and mouth. Her facial features are striking and Rivera draws our attention to them using a series of simple, sinuous lines that are more expressive than realistic. He captured the strength of Modotti‘s character–she was a successful photographer in a country where women had few rights–and the gentleness of her features. Rivera contrasted his use of line and contour with careful shading, using the same chalk to make a wide range of values. He allowed the paper to show through to create highlights on her chin, nose, and forehead. They are balanced by the nearly black areas in her hair. The...
‘Modotti’ review: Tina Modotti bio-play can’t build a fire with we kindling
by Joe Dziemianowicz Tina Modotti was a photographer and activist who fought on behalf of Mexican peasants in the 1930s. She died in 1942 in Mexico City at age 45 under shadowy circumstances. She’s an intriguing figure whose life has inspired a couple of films. Too bad more of that fascination hasn’t inched its way into “Modotti,” a play that wants to be a provocative and dangerous journey but doesn’t get there. At an opening scene set in 1920 Los Angeles, party guests are introduced to Modotti (Alysia Reiner). They hear about her girlhood in Italy and her move to America, where she worked as a seamstress and in silent films. The action shifts to Mexico, where she and her lover of the moment, Edward Weston (Jack Gwaltney), an...
Viva Mexico! Edward Weston and His Contemporaries
In the decades following the Revolution of 1910, foreign artists and intellectuals flocked to Mexico in order to experience its warm climate and lively cultural scene. They were inspired by Mexico‘s exotic tropical landscape, its ancient monuments and colonial architecture, the work of its modern muralists, and the country‘s indigenous arts and crafts. During two extended trips to Mexico made between 1923 and 1926, American photographer Edward Weston (1886–1958) created some of his earliest modernist photographs, which form the core of the exhibition, Viva Mexico! Edward Weston and His Contemporaries, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Featured are approximately 45 works, among them about 30 rare photographs by Weston and selected images by Tina...
THE MEXICO YEARS
Throckmorton Fine Art present Tina Modotti and Edward Weston’s photographic collaboration, from their important and productive Mexican years. For Weston, this period spans from 1923 till 1926, while Modotti stayed on until 1930, when she was forced into exile and left for Europe. The work in this exhibition will focus on Tina Modotti and Edwards Weston’s portraits and architectural photographs, in addition to still lives of Mexican folk art and Modotti’s socio-politically charged images. Modotti studied photography with Weston, whose aesthetic was based on the desire to give photography the status of high art through his formalist, “Form follows function” techniques. Weston rejected documentary realism, while the content of...
Photography
For a few exhilarating years in the 1920s, two of the major figures in 20th-century photography, Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, shared a passionate partnership with each other. They also shared an intense romance with photography and with Mexico, where they lived together from 1923 to 1926. At that time, Mexico was experiencing a period of political and social reinvigoration, and the vibrant cultural climate was both inspiration for and subject of their art. This exhibition includes some of the most significant photographs they made during their time in Mexico, pictures that count among the most memorable from each artist’s career. Their relationship also comes alive through a trove of personal letters, postcards, and small photographs recently acquired...