Monday,
August 14, 2006
Tina Modotti:
Forgotten Link between Art and Revolution
The
ANNOTICO Report
Ok,
so many of you have seen my slide from being Politically Independent toward the
Left, as I see the "coddling" of Robber Barons in the US, and the US
attempts at Imperialism and Colonialism worldwide.
But
then, how can one get excited about Socialism/Communism when you see it have
been so easily corrupted by the likes of Stalin, and Mao?
Nevertheless,
those who were pure of heart, and with the highest of motives, deserve
recognition for at least trying.
Tina
Modotti, was a Photographer,(when Photography
was not looked upon as an Art form) and a Revolutionary.
With
a partner, Tina single-handedly not only
established modern photography in Mexico, but memorialized the
cruelty of the "Elite" toward the poor. [Not much has changed in 80 years]
Tina
Modotti's biography by Letizia Argenteri
initially in English published by Yale University Press in 2003 was flat
and awkward since was not in the author's mother tongue. FrancoAngeli, in 2005, published in the original Italian
with a new introduction by Claudio Natoli that
remind us, that the communism Modotti professed
remains a live issue in Italy.
One
of the interesting aspects of Tina's life was it's "zig zagging", which leads
many historians to wonder, " Had Tina decided to redirect her life and
sought out a partner who had made the same decision? Or did men overpower her
with their life projects?"
One
thing is for sure. Paradoxically, Her discovery and
zeal for the causes of the underclass were crushed by the political infighting
of the political idealists she thought would deliver salvation to the
underclass. This strong resolute woman was drained, disillusioned, demoralized
and left shattered, dying at 46, old far beyond her years.
She
was one who obviously "cared" too much.
Tina Modotti:
A Blank Face Between Art And Revolution
Reviewed by Peter
Byrne
(Swans
- August 14, 2006) {Excerpted] Tina Modotti's
life could make passionate reading, a biography that, doing justice to her
political work, measured one courageous and gifted artist of the camera against
the epic events of the first half of the 20th century....
Italy's once powerful
Communist Party (PCI), now drastically reduced to feuding factions, still has
some political weight in local government and in a parliamentary system based
on very mixed coalitions. Where Argenteri's English
readers dwell, communism was essentially a 1930's phenomenon. Her Italian text
will be read where it's still possible to have a fistfight over the Stalinism
of Modotti and her last lover.
In Italy the
shop-worn joke that the PCI was an alternative church still has relevance. (If you find this over the top, watch a film clip of Palmiro Togliatti's funeral in Rome in 1964.) With
its family fidelities, saints, martyrs, black sheep, momentous events and
mighty doctrinal clashes, the PCI remains one of the great points of historical
reference for Italians. Right up to 1990 its cultural apparatus was at the
center of Italian life.
Indeed Argenteri appears a bit miffed that Italian communism
passes for a quaint anomaly and raises little interest in America where
she has studied and taught for years. She would like Modotti
to be appreciated there not only by feminists and anarchists but also by
"the true left" that has "virtually neglected" her. (The
author reminds us) "While the French
Communist Party was tied to Moscow, the Italian
Communist Party always tried to be independent from Moscow and to act accordingly."
*****
Tina's lifelong journey began obscurely enough.
Her family, eventually numbering seven children, was amongst the poor of the
then poor Northern Italian town of Udine.
Tina was a year old in 1897 when she began her itinerant life and her father, a
mechanic, took the family to Austria
in search of work. They returned to Udine in
1905, whence the breadwinner immigrated to America
on his own, settling after a while in San
Francisco. The set patterns of the old world crumbled
rapidly in the dynamic post earthquake economy, and Giuseppe Modotti tried his hand at several businesses including
photography.
In Udine at thirteen, Tina
began a three-year stint as a silk worker. One by one the family joined their
father in America.
It was Tina's turn in 1913 and at sixteen she arrived at Ellis
Island alone. When Tina reached San Francisco,
she was already a veteran of displacement within Europe, hard factory work,
solitary crossings of the Atlantic and the breadth of America, and
cumbersome immigration procedures. A less spirited teenager would have settled
for a safe haven.
Tina
began work in San Francisco
as a seamstress. Change was now second nature to her, and so was a growing
American sense that everything was possible. She assimilated rapidly and
without a backward glance. The dressmaker was soon a modiste
and then a model in a department store. The Italian community pulsed with
energy that had lain dormant in Europe. The
local stage burgeoned. Tina, petite, shapely, possessed of striking eyes, was
soon playing Latin characters in Italian language stage productions.
At this
point, men entered Tina's life, and so does a ticklish problem for her
biographers. She will often startle us by her autonomy and strength. Yet
there's no escaping the fact that each time her life changed
course it was together with a man already moving resolutely in the
chosen direction. Had Tina decided to redirect her life and sought out a
partner who had made the same decision? Or did men overpower her with their
life projects? Perhaps questions of the sort are best avoided in favor of
concentrating on Tina's accomplishments and individuality.
Roubaix
de l'Abrie Rickey, known as Robo,
was only an imaginative boy from Oregon, ...who came to San Francisco to study
art and play the artist to the hilt in the green carnation style....Robo would introduce Tina to bohemian San Francisco and the
notion of visual art and poetry as ecstatic ends in themselves. The lovers soon
moved to Los Angeles
and formed a glamorous couple at the center of a circle of art fanciers. It was
1917 and they weren't unaware of world events like the social upheaval south of
the border or the Russian Revolution. But their main concern was artistic
innovation and new, non-conventional departures in personal life. Tina, already
an experienced stage actress, took roles in three Hollywood
films.
Robo was attracted to Mexico, but
after a sojourn of a few months there in 1922, publishing drawings and
delighting in the country, he caught smallpox and died. Tina, who had been on
the point of joining him, (they had never in fact married) also lost her father
just then. She was ready to turn her back on California.
The
next man in Tina's life, was the established Los Angeles photographer
Edward Weston. He was thirty-seven and married with four sons. Very much in the
spirit of the 1920's -- Weston felt his art suffered from his conventional life
and surroundings. He saw a remedy in moving to Mexico and continuing his work
there for a time. Tina, at twenty-seven, unattached and ready for a new life,
agreed to accompany him. He would take her on as his assistant and business
manager. In lieu of salary, she would receive lessons in photography.
It has
been said that while the Mexican Revolution of 1910 failed politically, it
succeeded culturally. When Tina and Weston arrived in 1923, the painters
Rivera, Orozco, Martinez,
Siqueros, and Tamayo were all at work. Poetry
thrived, and foreign artists and writers were welcomed. The couple soon became
part of this lively international artistic community. Weston was acclaimed for
having understood the beauty of the country and Tina was credited with
acquiring her own remarkable style as a photographer. It would later be said
that the pair single-handedly
established modern photography in Mexico.
Their
approaches differed. Weston represented took his art to Mexico and it
grew there, but he would afterward take it home with him again. Tina had found
her home and her art in Mexico.
The poverty she saw there affected her as nothing else in her life had managed
to do. This was the pure principle at the origin of her political commitment,
and she had discovered it with her camera. Weston characteristically warned her
about sentimentalizing the proletariat and the Indians.
By the
time Weston left Mexico
for good in 1926, he and Tina were no longer lovers, and she was on her way to
assuming another identity. Art, politics and free love had been a heady and
productive mixture in her first Mexican years. Tina, physically incapable of
motherhood, now found her family relationships among the politically
like-minded. She began her long association with Red Aid, a mutual help
organization of the left. She collaborated with El Machete, a Communist Party
review founded by artists. All the men in her life would henceforth be
political activists.
Xavier
Guerrero, the first of Tina's militant partners could have been a poster boy
for the revolutionary artist. He was an intransigent member of the Mexican
Communist Party whose hierarchical decisions he accepted with something like
religious faith. Ordered to the Lenin School in Moscow
for three years, he packed his bags without a murmur. It was just before he
left in 1927 that Tina joined the Party herself.
Guerrero's
austerity sharply contrasted with Tina's radical bohemian friends of the past.
He was not immune to jealousy. When Tina wrote him in Moscow that her affections had shifted to
another militant, Guerrero was as bitter as any thwarted patriarch. The new
messenger from the gods was a Cuban, eight years Tina's junior, Julio Antonio Mella. He had been one of the founders of the Cuban
Communist Party and had tangled not only with the dictator Machado but also
with comrades on the Cuban left. Forced into exile, Mella,
a born maverick, soon enraged Mexican Communists by daring to criticize Stalin.
When he was assassinated in 1929, Machado's agents were presumably responsible.
But the Mexican Communist Party was not unhappy at his demise. Tina herself had
to disprove accusations of complicity in his murder.
Mexico City then took on a more
somber hue. The Mexican Communist Party predated the Bolshevik Revolution and
had been a fusion of Marxism with populist libertarianism. Its war cry was as
often Viva Zapata as Workers of the World Unite. Tina had been captivated by
the eruption of the humble and the indigenous into the world of politics and
art. It heralded breakthrough and fresh beginnings. Most of all, it spoke of
freedom. Now came the age of iron. Tina made a fateful decision and went along
with the purge in the Mexican Communist Party that followed Mella's
death. She was learning to obey. It's hard not to see in her a need and desire
for stronger discipline. At this juncture she moved closer to the Comintern agent Vittorio Vidali, a Stalinist disciplinarian par excellence.
In 1930
the Mexican Party was made illegal. Tina, declared politically undesirable and
deported from Mexico, found
herself on a boat to Europe. Vidali left Mexico
of his own accord and joined her on the voyage. As long as Tina's life lasted,
it would be lived in his truculent shadow.
Tina
went to Berlin.
Leftist Weimar culture was on the boil there,
with writers like Brecht, Babel,
and Canetti all active. But Tina, disorientated, lost her confidence and
doubted her ability to compete as a photographer. Away from Mexico she felt
unable to combine art and political militancy. She opted for the latter and
joined Vidali in Moscow. They lived as husband and wife and
also -- Vidali knew no other way -- as mentor and
disciple. But keeping alive under Stalin wasn't easy, even for yes-men and
sycophants. The ambient paranoia made the couple glad to escape as Soviet
agents on missions to various parts of Western Europe.
In 1934 they were ordered to Spain.
In 1936
Franco launched the attack that started the Spanish Civil War. Vidali became the first political commissar of the Spanish
republican army. His task was to form the fabled Fifth Regiment on the model of
the Soviet Red Army. Tina reorganized hospitals, served as a nurse and then
resumed Red Aid work. At the same time she learned to shoot and throw grenades
with the women's section of the Fifth Regiment.
Vidali's leadership proved
ruthless and brutal. He was responsible for the torture and death of many
Republicans who rejected Stalin's orders. For instance, Vidali
played a direct role in the liquidation of Andres Nin, one of the founders of
the Spanish Communist Party. Tina, very close to Vidali
in Spain,
did not dissociate herself from his crimes. She was a Stalinist too and, if she
wasn't a natural killer like her lover, she was not above denouncing dissident
comrades.
After
the Loyalist defeat in 1939, Mexico
proved the most hospitable country to refugees. Vidali
entered legally as a hero. Tina, who had been expelled in 1930, arrived with
false papers. She was old beyond her years, shattered, listless, but still
apparently a Comintern agent. It pained her to even
think of her first joyous years in Mexico. She had no money and her
relationship with Vidali was in tatters. When Trotsky
was murdered in 1940, suspicion fell on Vidali.
Tina
died mysteriously in 1942, alone in a taxi, and again voices rose accusing Vidali. She had told a friend, "He is an assassin. He
dragged me into an atrocious murder. I detest him with all my soul.
Nevertheless I must follow him until death."
On her
return to Mexico Tina had refused to touch a camera. It was like a phobia. Or
shame. As a photographer she had been generous, open and loving. In her mind
the compromises of militancy had cancelled all that out. What had her
intriguing with Vidali to do with her original motive
of sympathy for the poor? The productive peak of her career had passed by 1930.
Party work absorbed her in Europe.
Humanitarian efforts took precedent in Spain, but so did the Stalinist
maneuvering that may well have given Franco victory. Tina, back in Mexico where it
had all begun, knew that lack of time explained nothing. Her political work had
separated her from generosity, openness and love, and so doing made art
impossible. The realization left her demoralized. Cameras didn't kill people.
Putting hers aside to enter the ideological wars, she had become only another
guilty victim.
Tina
must have asked herself whether the apolitical individualist Edward Weston
hadn't made the wiser choice. He awakened Mexico to modern photography,
influenced a generation there and at home with the rigor of his art, and kept
turning out innovative work until the end of his life. His fidelity to his
talent and vocation could certainly be called egoism. But he didn't take orders
from hardened killers or condone their deeds in the name of a better world that
the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression Pact decidedly did not bring any
closer.
The old
saw says that it's the victors that write history. The survivors, however, have
the last word. Tina Modotti died in 1942 at
forty-six. Vittorio Vidali
lived on till 1983, reaching eighty-three. Installed as an Italian life
senator, he had plenty of leisure to turn out a series of books prettifying his
time with Tina and generally tidying up his blood-soaked career. Argenteri regrets that many commentators have as a matter
of course cast Vidali in a villain's role. She
herself would rather not judge him. But the fact that demonizing goes on
doesn't mean that some men haven't acted like demons.
And
what of Mexico
in all this?
For Vittorio Vidali it was
a gray site, perfect for deadly political intrigue. For Julio Antonio Mella it was a place where he could make a defiant
political stand for a Latin American revolution. Xavier Guerrero saw it as a
social tragedy remedied only by international socialist discipline. Edward
Weston treasured its innocence and unforgettable beauty of form. Robot toyed
with its mysteries while infection taught him its cruel reality. Tina Modotti, sharing all these visions, had been dispossessed
of her own: that of a land where she could help and love the poor, undisturbed
by homicidal ideologues.
http://www.swans.com/library/
art12/pbyrne11.html
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