Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary
By Margaret Hooks
Pandora, 1993. 227 pp., $45 (hb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
In 1991, a photograph of a rose fetched $165,000 at a Sotheby's art auction. Not such an unusual example of the ingestion of art by the omnivorous dollar, you might think, except that the photographer was Tina Modotti, a Latin American communist militant of the '20s and '30s.
Margaret Hooks, in her new biography of Modotti, sees the "recent commercial success" of Modotti's photographic art as also mirroring "a growing recognition of the artistic value and historical importance of her work".
Modotti was born in Italy and in poverty in 1896, becoming a factory worker at age 12. In 1913, she migrated to America and more hard times. However, poverty and the restrictions on political and personal freedom which were needed to keep the lid on social unrest, did not stunt her outlook but rather thrust her into fruitful contact with the ideas of socialism, sexual liberation and artistic rebellion.
Through most of her life, in her "relationships, her sexuality and career decisions, she made difficult choices which flaunted tradition — sexual independence over marriage, political commitment in place of personal security".
In her bohemian American years, as model, actress, Hollywood starlet and photographer, she mixed with the "liberated artistic circles", sharing their disdain for social convention and their advocacy of free love and socialistic utopias.
The emphasis, however, was on "the art of having a good time" until, to escape Prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan, her move to Mexico propelled her towards more serious alternatives. Diego Rivera, the communist muralist, introduced her to active revolutionary politics and she joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1927, remaining a member until her death in 1942.
During the early period of her communist years she disproved her earlier belief that art could not be used to express social concerns. She could still do a stunning rose, but now she also captured workers' lives: the degradation and nobility, the wasted potential and tenaciously affirmed self-respect of Mexico's workers and poor, and the grandeur and strength of their class in political struggle.
With the mounting urgency of fascism and war in the '30s, Modotti put away her camera to devote herself fully to socialist internationalism and anti-fascism, displaying supreme personal courage during the Spanish Civil War.
Modotti was, however, an orthodox Stalinist. She supported the expulsion of Rivera from the party for "Trotskyist deviationism" and, as a high-profile party member, did not oppose the murderous attacks by Mexican Stalinists on the exiled Trotsky.
But she did have trouble accepting the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact because she was too much the anti-fascist. Neither would she accept an offer to be the official photographer for the Soviet Communist Party, because she was too much the artist.
These and other flaws in her orthodoxy are not explored by Hooks' biography because the evidence is scant. Indeed, the narrative pace of the book is rather breathless, with little pause for theoretical rumination.
It is Modotti's photographs that are most memorable. They are richly expressive of stillness and reflection, vitality and movement, eroticism and love of beauty, all guided by her "great human empathy", which made her such a loved figure by all those who met her (except the Mexican police and anticommunists). Egon Kisch, the Czech anti-fascist journalist, got to the essence of Modotti's politically informed artistic genius and human understanding — "through the insight of good will, [her photographs] make the world more visible".
No socialist now need be ashamed to acquire that coffee table to go with this lavish yet subversive book which contains a generous helping of the splendid photographs of Tina Modotti.