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| Tina Modotti: A Life
     
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Hardcover
225 pages
St. Martin's Press
Published 1999
Amazon.com
In 1913 Italian-born Modotti (1896-1943) immigrated to the United States, where she enthusiastically embraced both radical politics and photographer Edward Weston, the first of many prominent men who would love the charismatic artist. Apart from the formally rigorous, socially engaged photographs that made her reputation, Modotti's most ardent passions were for revolutionary Mexico, where she lived from 1922 to 1930, and for Communist activist Julio Mella, whose murder in 1929 engulfed her in the juicy scandal with which Italian journalist Cacucci opens his dishy biography. Modotti spent the 1930s serving the Soviet Union's interests in many of the world's hot spots, notably Spain during its vicious civil war; commitment to Communism gave her a sense of stability her turbulent personal affairs did not. She died mysteriously four years after her return to Mexico, by rumor at the hands of Stalinist poisoners. Cacucci's fascination with abstruse Communist ideological squabbles may not be shared by all readers, and his methodology is decidedly slapdash: he doesn't provide footnotes, and pages of direct dialogue have no discernable source other than the author's imagination. However, his breathless prose certainly conveys the drama of Modotti's short, intense life. --Wendy Smith
From 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... read more
Book Description
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.
Born in Udine, Italy, in 1896, Tina Modotti immigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen, settling with her family in San Francisco in order to escape the misery and poverty of the world from which they came. Modotti initially sought work in the local silk factory and as a dressmaker, but her beauty and poise soon launched her into a career as a silent film actress and artist's model. 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.
It was in Mexico that Modotti blossomed, both as a talented artist and as a fiery and dedicated worker for the cause of the revolutionary left, and where she befriended artists Rivera and Frieda Kahlo. However, in 1929 Modotti, long under suspicion by the Mexican police, was arrested in connection with the murder of Julio Antonio Mella, a Cuban revolutionary and also her lover. Though the real killers were never identified, the Mexican press raised a scandal by publishing nude photographs of Modotti taken by Weston and depicting her as a woman of easy virtue. She was eventually exiled from Mexico. Denied re-entry to the United States, Modotti fled first 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 a |
Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti
Patricia Albers |  |
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Tina Modotti: Between Art and Revolution
Letizia Argenteri |  |
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Tina Modotti: A Life
Pino Cacucci; & Patricia J. Duncan (Translator) |  |
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Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary
Margaret Hooks |  |
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Tina Modotti: Radical Photographer
Margaret Hooks |  |
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Tina Modotti
Margaret Hooks |  |
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Tina Modotti Photographs
Sarah Lowe |  |
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Tina Modotti & Edward Weston: The Mexico Years
Sarah Lowe (Editor) |  |
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Tina Modotti: Image, Texture, Photography
Andrea Noble |  |
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Tina Modotti the Mexican Renaissance
Sam Stourdze (Introduction); Patricia Albers; & Cordero Reiman |  |
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