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 “other” as Kahlo’s Jewish background. But Modotti has an item in her biography that has made her as appealing to tenured revolutionary fantasists: Modotti was a full-time functionary of the Stalinist movement during the 1930s.
No amount of campus- or museum-based idolatry can promote Modotti’s art above the “minor” level identified by Mr. Kramer. Still it is useful to study the life of Tina Modotti because she stands as perhaps the best representative of all those personalities of the 1930s whose ideals, for those who truly possessed them, were betrayed, and whose lives were ruined by Stalinism. These two books demonstrate the extent to which the Modotti cult has grown, while also showing the limitations of American publishing. Each book, in its own way, is an appalling product.
Patricia Albers’s offering is by far the worse. Its author communicates her limitations in the opening pages; while describing Modotti’s death, she writes that her heroine’s “last flickering perceptions are of darkness, solitude, and drift.” It is hard to prove such a claim wrong, but it would be interesting to have it sourced.
Mrs. Albers writes in only one mode: gushing enthusiasm. Every event in this book–which covers some of the most terrible episodes in twentieth century history-is treated as if it were a party with great refreshments and wonderful favors. Mrs. Albers brings to the story of Tina Modotti, art photographer and secret police agent, the sensibility of a suburban matron hosting a reception for a visiting feminist professor. This is, perhaps, appropriate, or at least authentic, in that Modotti has become a heroine
