First she was forgotten and died; later discovered: Who is Tina Modotti?

Tina Modotti is one of the artists, a photographers, who was first forgotten and rediscovered long after her death. Remembered after her death in 1942 - and only - for her relationship with Edward Weston, Tina Modotti is an artist and activist worthy of recognition, both for her photography and interesting life story.

The story of Tina Modotti begins in 1896 in a poor family in Udine, Northern Italy. After the family returns to Udine after a few years as a migrant worker in Austria, father Modotti goes to the USA, San Francisco, to work. After finishing primary school, the little girl started working in textile workshops to support her mother, who was a tailor. When she was 16, she immigrated to San Francisco with her father. With the help of her beauty and warm personality, she first finds small roles in theater plays and then starts to act in silent films. Meanwhile, she falls in love with actor, painter, and poet Roubaix de l'Abrie Richey, known as "Robo", and then they go to Hollywood, the heart of the film industry.

After a few supporting roles, Tina managed to get a lead role in the movie "The Tiger's Coat" in 1920. Joining the bohemian art circles of Los Angeles with Robo, the young woman soon becomes the model, then the student, and finally the lover of Edward Weston, one of the famous photographers of the time.

Tina Modotti (born Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti Mondini, August 16/17, 1896 – January 5, 1942) was an Italian American photographer, model, actor, and revolutionary political activist for the Comintern. She left Italy in 1913 and moved to the United States, where she settled in San Francisco with her father and sister. In San Francisco, Modotti worked as a model and, later, as a photographer. In 1922 she moved to Mexico, where she became an active member of the Mexican Communist Party.

In 1921, Robo receives an invitation from Mexico City, one of the most vibrant art capitals of that period, and takes with him samples of Weston's work, apart from his own paintings and photographs; she hopes to open a group exhibition there. A few months later, just as Tina was on her way to join him, she receives the news that Robo had died of smallpox two days ago. When she arrived in Mexico City, Tina was smitten with the city, which managed to organize a two-week exhibition of her and Weston's work to keep her memory alive; Although she had to return to the USA due to the unexpected death of her father, her mind remains in Mexico City. She finally persuades Weston, and a year later they move to Mexico City (Weston took his eldest son, Chandler, while leaving behind his wife and three children).

Modotti and Weston open a photography studio in Mexico City. Weston devotes more time to original photography, while Tina mostly handles the studio work. The parties the couple organizes in their hacienda just outside the city soon became the meeting place of the avant-garde artists and revolutionary politicians of the city (Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera meet for the first time at one of these parties).

Although Tina Modotti learned photography from Weston, her subject choices diverged over time. Tina, who initially takes “plain” photographs in the style she learned from Weston, prefers to turn her lens over time to people rather than inanimate objects and landscapes.

Tina Modotti's photography that puts people in the focus is enhanced by the Ministry of Culture's proposal to photograph wall paintings - which are being done in all cities after the revolution. Modotti, who traveled all over Mexico between 1924 and 1928 and documented the murals of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera, found the opportunity to get to know the Mexican people and their cultural values ​​in this process.

Tina's photographs from this period are a unique combination of simple photography she learned from Weston and social realism. Interestingly, even the artist's most provocative photographs not only have the serenity and sharpness of still life, but often shift towards the abstract, something not common in revolutionary art.

Communist Party

After Weston's return to the United States in 1926, Tina Modotti joins the Mexican Communist Party. While making her living from portrait photography, she also takes photographs for socialist publications in Europe and America. These years are also the years of Mexico's post-revolutionary "consolidation". In this period marked by the power struggle between the generals on the winning side, the pressure on the socialists is also increasing.

In 1928, Tina Modotti meets and fell in love with Julio Antonio Mella, a Cuban socialist student leader living in exile in Mexico City. A year later, the assassination of the young man while walking hand-in-hand with Tina on the Paseo de la Reforma boulevard initiates a lynching movement against the young woman, and Modotti, who was even imprisoned for a few days for being involved in this murder, was criticized by the press, communist (true) and immoral (not true). ) is constantly faced with accusations that she is. In 1930, she was forced to flee the country, this time accused of being involved in an assassination attempt on the then-Mexican president; first to Rotterdam and then to Berlin by ship.

However, due to both her lack of financial means to open a photography studio in Berlin and the rise of Nazism, she went to Moscow in 1931, following the suggestion of her friend Vittorio Vidali. For the next few years, she carried out political work in Europe on behalf of the International Workingmen's Solidarity organization - in fact as an agent of the Comintern.

Spain, Mexico

After living in France and Germany for a while under a false identity, Tina Modotti moves to Spain with the outbreak of the civil war and takes the side of the Republicans against Franco forces; After the war was lost in 1939, she did not return to Moscow, instead she headed to New York. However, Modotti, who went to Mexico on a fake passport when she was not allowed to enter the USA due to her communist past, was pardoned after a while, as it was revealed that she had been wrongly accused in the assassination in 1930, and began to live with her real identity.

In her last few years of trying to make a living by translating in Mexico City, Tina Modotti is no longer involved in politics. Aside from what she witnessed while in Moscow, this woman of faith must have been very disappointed, especially when the Soviet Union invaded Poland in coordination with the Nazis in 1939, as soon as they signed a non-aggression pact with Germany.

When Tina Modotti's journey from Udine to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Rotterdam, Berlin, Moscow, Paris, and Madrid, and finally to Mexico City, ends with a heart attack in a taxi on her way back from a dinner in early 1942. The woman is only 46 years old. Tina Modotti, who was determined to have died of natural causes in the autopsy performed on allegations that she was poisoned because of what she knew about the Soviets, is buried in the Panteón de Dolores cemetery of Mexico City today; The tombstone carved by engraver Leopoldo Méndez is decorated with a stanza from the poem "Tina Modotti is Dead", written for her after her death by her poet friend Pablo Neruda:

“Your sweet name is pure, your fragile life is pure.

From the shadows, the sea foam, the silence,

from bee and fire and snow, pollen,

your delicate form, hard as iron, formed of line and steel.”