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Tina Modotti: A Life

Name: Tina Modotti: A Life
Author: Pino Cacucci
ISBN: 9780312200367

by Pino Cacucci

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Overview

The life of Tina Modotti is the stuff of enduring legend. Her sensual, melancholic beauty inspired the work of the most brilliant artists, photographers, and writers of her time, including Diego Rivera, Edward Weston, and Pablo Neruda. Her fierce commitment to the social and political causes of the working class and her affiliation with the Mexican Communist Party landed her at the center of national controversy in Mexico. A gifted photographer in her own right, Modotti is now widely recognized as one of the great artists of the early twentieth century. It was through her work as a model that she met photographer Edward Weston. Though already married to California poet Roubaix de l'Abrie Richey (known as Robo), Modotti fell in love with Weston and with photography and left with him for Mexico in 1922. In Mexico Modotti blossomed, both as a talented artist and as a dedicated worker for the cause of the revolutionary left, and befriended artists Rivera and Frieda Kahlo. In 1929 Modotti, under suspicion by the Mexican police, was arrested in connection with the murder of Julio Antonio Mella, a Cuban revolutionary and her lover. Though the killers were never identified, the Mexican press raised a scandal by publishing nude photographs of Modotti taken by Weston. She was eventually exiled from Mexico. Denied re-entry to the United States, Modotti field to Germany and then to Moscow, where she abandoned her photography and worked as a bureaucrat for the Communist Party and traveled on clandestine missions for the "Red Rescue." In 1936 Modotti moved to Spain, where she met Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Andre Malraux, and Robert Capa. Although Capa tried to encourage her to take up her photography again, Modotti was by now dedicating herself exclusively to political militancy. At the fall of the Spanish Republic in 1939, Modotti returned to Mexico, where she died on January 5, 1942.

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Editorials

...[A]n illuminating study....[A] well-told, powerful and exciting history filled with tragedy and political intrigue.

Library Journal

The photographer and Communist organizer Tina Modotti (18961942) lived in a seeming whirlwind of artistic creation and personal and political intrigue. Two new biographies trace her life as she developed her immense artistic skill, loved passionately, and eventually sacrificed her art to her work for social justice through the Communist Party. In a brief and clipped work, Italian journalist Cacucci lays out the machinations of Modottis life. He sketches a chronology of her love lifeincluding her relationships with the young poet known as Robo, the photographer Edward Weston, the Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella, and the menacing Soviet operative Vidali Vittorioand seems unduly fascinated by the power of Modottis beauty. As a result, she comes off as a frail social climber, and the book is tiring at best. On the other hand, in the most complete and readable biography of Modotti to date, Albers, a curator and writer, portrays a complex woman who made extraordinary life choices in an attempt to unite personal desires with the social realities of her time. While men were important to Modotti (she once playfully proclaimed them to be her profession), she was a thoroughly modern woman who cared most about navigating the wavering balance between life, art, and the need for social change. Albers avoids casting Modotti in a clich, acknowledging that she was never entirely free of either the fear of impoverishment or the encumbering domestic role women were expected to play. Rather, Modottis mind was often absorbed in the minutiae of life: setting up households, making pasta, planning art shows, and facilitating Party efforts. When considered in this context, Modotti seems more inspired workhorse than princessand all the more interesting for the added detail. Libraries can avoid Cacuccis effort, but Alberss is essential. [Photographs not seen.]Rebecca Miller, Library Journal

NY Times Book Review

...[Attempts] to make sense of the colorful traces she left behind....

Kirkus Reviews

Here's a blockbuster romance waiting to be filmed: Beautiful, gifted Italian immigrant turns Soviet spy and is loved by Edward Weston, befriended by Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo, and, after her mysterious death, mourned by Pablo Neruda. According to Italian writer and journalist Cacucci, Modotti came to the US from Italy in 1913. She was 17, strikingly attractive, and enigmatically compelling to the poet/painter whom she soon married and followed to Los Angeles. Her voluptuous figure gained her femme fatale Hollywood roles, but she abandoned cinema in favor of an intense affair with photographer Weston, who introduced her to the still camera. Modotti and Weston headed for Mexico City, where Tina involved herself in the postrevolutionary artistic and political ferment. In their circle were artists Rivera, Xavier Guerrero, David Siqueiros, and others who influenced her politics and her work. Increasingly sure-footed in her photographs of street life, she "opened the door to social documentary," according to the author. Nevertheless, her hard-line Communist stance forced her to flee Mexico for Moscow. Giving up photography, Modotti alternated Politburo duties with political espionage, landing in Spain during the Civil War. Reassigned to the US, she was deported to Mexico, where she backed off from the Communist Party, disillusioned by the Hitler/Stalin pact and the first assassination attempt on Trotsky (then in Mexico). She died in 1943 in a taxi, en route home from a dinner party. Was it suicide or assassination? No sure answer. This biography was published in Italy in 1991 and has been translated somewhat stiffly into English by Duncan More troubling than the stops and starts of thetranslation are the intermittent "you-are-there" dialogues-between, for instance, Modotti and a Mexican prosecutor, and Modotti and lover Julio Mello. Who was present to record these conversations? A life of mystery, passion, dedication, and talent that begs, "Tell us more."