Wandering Among the Muses, Part 1: Roses

by

Nicki Leone

The first time I ever heard of Tina Modotti was just after I was out of college, as broke as a bookseller on minimum wage can be in a crowded city where the rents usually take up half of a decent salary. I had been holding a stack of magazines to restock the little bookstore newsstand, when a copy of Time fell out of my hands and opened on the ground at my feet. There, across the center double-page spread was a grainy image of “Roses,” which had just made the news when it was sold at auction for “more money than anyone had ever paid for a photograph before.”

The photograph mesmerized me. I remember crouching down to look at it, splayed open on the worn wooden floor, before I picked it up casually and took it to the back room. No, I didn’t steal it, exactly. I simply left the magazine among the pile of others the staff would peruse during cigarette and coffee breaks. But not before I had torn out the pages with the photo and slipped them into my bag. That night I dreamed I was falling into the picture, the rose petals soft and clinging to my skin. I woke up hot, damp and breathless.

That magazine picture stayed with me for several years—taped above my desk or folded into the pages of whatever journal I was haphazardly keeping at the time. Sometimes, I would unfold it and stare at the roses before I would go to bed, in the hopes of having that dream again. I looked up Tina Modotti, of course, but the Internet was still a few years off. I believe we still relied upon clay tablets and papyrus scrolls. I could find nothing written about an obscure female photographer whose claim to fame seemed to begin and end with one expensive photograph and the fact that she was Edward Weston’s model, apprentice, mistress and muse.

It took a couple of years before a freelance correspondent living in Mexico named Margaret Hooks published a biography of Modotti, with the forthright title Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary. I remember taking the book out of the box and immediately flipping through it, stopping at all the pictures, enjoying the shivery flush that crawled over me when I came to "Roses," used as the frontispiece to the book. Enjoying also, the sense of the future strung forth in “Telegraph wires," its implied promise in “Doors” and “Stairs” and “The typewriter.” In Modotti’s photographs—in her many portraits but also in her photographs of buildings, objects, flowers, even her self portraits and nudes—I felt the sense of a rising tide. Whether that tide was her rising creativity and artistic vision, her hopes for an oncoming socialist revolution to sweep the world, or simply my own flooding sense of creative purpose and erotic awakening is hard to say—a reader brings only himself—herself—to a book. All I can say is that I had the book for over a week before I stopped just looking at the pictures and actually read it.

Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary—the title sums up everything a reader can expect to find in this book. Margaret Hooks was determined to write a comprehensive account of a woman whose contributions—both to photography and to history—had until then been sidelined and eclipsed by the men in her orbit—the early pioneers of photography, the early leaders of the socialist and communist movements. A feminist scholar at heart, Hooks undertook to shift the spotlight from Modotti’s many lovers and teachers onto the woman herself—a woman who, we are convinced by the end of the story, effected events as often as she was affected by them.

Tina Modotti was born in Italy, moved to California as a young woman where she had a brief but vivid career in the silent movies. She became interested in photography and through a series of fortuitous events, established herself in the studio of Edward Weston, where she quickly became his favorite model, and eventually his lover and his apprentice. It was the early twenties; the age of the avant garde, of artistic and sexual exploration, a time when art was no longer expected to imitate life—rather life was to be lived as art.  

Modotti and Weston traveled to Mexico in the early 1920s. Mexico City was becoming a center of cultural and artistic revolution, attracting an international collection of artists, poets and philosophers. Ultimately, though, revolution was not as interesting to Weston as art, and he returned to California. Tina Modotti stayed, however, finding something in the political foment that inspired her. Modotti’s apartments became a gathering place for radicals and writers, a salon of sorts although that word does little to describe the furious political and sexual intrigues that the gatherings seemed to spawn.  

Hooks gives a careful account—citing a bewilderingly large number of names, places and dates in rapid succession—of Modotti’s time in Mexico from her first visit with her famous photographer mentor to her eventual exile with the then equally famous radical communist mentor Vittorio Vidali. As a biographer, she is careful, perhaps overly so, to document every point in Modotti’s life than can be reasonably documented. And it was a fantastic, colorful life, filled with great passion and idealism, at least two political assassinations, several frightening acts of espionage, not to mention a number of turbulent, headline-producing affairs. So perhaps the rising sense of frustration I felt as I read was irrational—but I had a persistent feeling that being told what had happened in Tina Modotti’s life was not the same thing as knowing how it happened. The problem with careful documentation is that it can’t talk about what can’t be documented—her attempt to live as though her art, her desires and her political beliefs were all things that would compliment, not conflict:

“You may say to me then,” she once wrote to Weston, “that since the element of life is stronger in me than the element of art I should just resign to it and make the best of it—but I cannot accept life as it is—it is too chaotic—too unconscious—therefore my resistance to it—my combat with it—I am forever struggling to mould life according to my temperament and needs . . . I put too much art in my life”

Hooks tells us about Modotti’s lovers, but not about how she falls in love. She records how she learned to take a picture, but not how she learned what to photograph. The phases of Tina Modotti’s life are laid out like a well organized file, a dossier worthy of any secret service organization. But nowhere was there any hint for an electrified and frustrated reader at what made her take a picture like “Roses.”

Sometime in 1931, two years after her Cuban lover Julia Antonio Mella was shot at her side while they walked down a dark street (so close, Tina could taste gunpowder in her mouth when she gasped), and one year after the Mexican government had her deported for her Communist activities, she lost the struggle to keep her love, her politics and her photography serving the same cause. She was ready to sacrifice her life for the cause of the proletariat, but she couldn’t sacrifice her artistic standards or her aesthetics. When it became a choice of a good picture or the good of the people, Tina Modotti put her camera down.

Part II—The Dove

Sometime in 1923 Tina Modotti gave one of the parties that had become a focal point for the artistic and radical set in Mexico City.  It might be said of most of the men who came that they came for Tina, not the politics or the conversation. But one man for whom that was not true was Diego Rivera, the muralist with a rising reputation for his art, his socialism and his many affairs. By the time of the party, however, his brief affair with Tina was long over, ending amicably on both sides when they realized they enjoyed talking politics and art with each other more than they enjoyed sex. The party got a little wild: “[it was] a period when people carried pistols and went around shooting the street lamps on Madero Avenue and getting into mischief,” recalled one of the people at the party. “Diego shot a phonograph and I began to be very interested in him in spite of the fear I had of him.” The speaker was a young painter named Frida Kahlo, who had just seen Rivera for the first time.

Like Tina Modotti, my first encounter with Frida Kahlo, was through her art. It was, in its way, just as shocking—an angry boyfriend sent me a postcard of a painting called “Broken Column.” It was the picture of a woman split down the middle, weeping, the two halves of her body held together by nails and surgical tape. In between, a cracked and ruined stone column ran from her head down to her hips. On the back of the card was scrawled the words “fuck you!”

Kahlo and Modotti were good friends until Tina Modotti’s politics finally resulted in her exile to Europe. The women had a lot in common—they believed in art as a political force. They felt that desire was a form of creativity. They struggled to keep their own artistic existence separate and distinct from works of the men in their lives. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo were married not long after they first met, and the marriage lasted until Kahlo’s death in 1954, despite their tempestuous natures and frequent, tumultuous affairs on both sides. He was called The Frog Prince. She was often called The Dove. Kahlo found in Rivera a mentor and teacher, but whereas Rivera’s work was large scale, historical and even epic, her own was more internal, folkloric, and intimate—often only 12 or 15 inches wide. It is pretty well known that Kahlo survived a terrible accident when she was only eighteen—her school bus was rammed by a streetcar in Mexico City, and Kahlo was impaled on a metal bar. Her spine was fractured, her pelvis crushed, her foot broken. That she survived at all was a miracle, but she survived to live forever in constant pain and illness, unable to ever bear children, and to the certain future of ongoing medical procedures and operations and battles against her body’s disintegration. “She lived dying” said one friend. She learned to paint, to really paint, laying on her back in a hospital bed. “Death dances around me,” she wrote in a letter to a lover. Death would dance around her for the next twenty-nine years, until she finally gave in and took his hand.

For a long time Kahlo, like Modotti, was known as much for the men she loved as she was for her own art. Also like Modotti, her own work has since become to be regarded as critically significant in its own right. Oddly enough, although her husband’s work marched across buildings, portraying historical events and people and symbols of industry and agriculture, it is Kahlo’s galaxy of self portraits—sad-eyed, weeping and bleeding, broken, cut apart, littered across desert scapes and dream-like jungles—that have endured.

During the last ten years of her life Kahlo kept a journal, The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait, a vivid scrawling volume of sketches, poetry, letters and appeals that I have read and stared at over and over again. It is a diary like none other in the world of letters. Not the quiet, considered reflections of an artist or philosopher sitting at their desk at the close of the day. Not the safe haven where she might indulge her wit and write down all the things she thought, but did not say, to the company she kept.  No, this is a document that seems to have been written in fits and starts, as though she put brush and pen to paper because she simply couldn’t help herself. Turning the facsimiled pages—reproduced in full color, every marred sketch and crossed out word intact—I felt like I wasn’t seeing writing  at all, but a process of spontaneous combustion. (“The are of Frida Kahlo,” said Andre Breton, “is a ribbon around a bomb.”)

The first pages of the book are neater, filled with incantations (“no moon, sun, diamonds, hands—fingertip, dot, ray, gauze sea. pine green, pink glass, eye, mine, eraser, mud, mother, I am coming.”). But as the years progress, the neat penmanship gives way to more impulsive scrawls in many different colored inks and paints. Sometimes she writes about revolution, confronting the same issues Modotti faced—the ferocious tug between politics, revolution and art. “Always revolutionary, never dead, never useless,” she writes on one page. “A despair which no words can describe,” she says two pages later. “I’m still eager to live. I’ve started to paint again.” And further on, under a watercolor sketch of a woman’s body floating among pale circles like soap bubbles “Sleep Sleep Sleep Sleep Sleep Sleep I’m falling asleep.”

He’d hate to hear it, but I have always secretly been thankful to that angry boyfriend. He meant only to scare me, but I was too captivated by the woman in the painting to be frightened. Kahlo and Modotti have been called “muses” to the men in their lives—the sources of inspiration for other men’s great works. But the women I discovered were muses in the classic sense—women who embody the arts and inspire the creation process. I decided, as paged through a book of Kahlo’s paintings, turning over that card over in my hands, that this was a goal worth pursuing—to take your life and make it art.

There is a poem by Pablo Neruda on Tina Modotti’s gravestone:

Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life,
bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam,
combined with steel and wire and
pollen to make up your firm
and delicate being.