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1/2/2006

Mexican Lives

ArteF Galerie, Zurich

Tina Modotti, Lucia Messeguer

Mexican Life - reflected in three women

Tina Modotti, the most enigmatic photographer of the twentieth century observes the historically turbulent time of the Mexican Renaissance through the lens of her camera and follows the country's laborious steps as it moves towards the modern age. Between the illustrious Hollywood actress and communist revolutionary phases of her life there is a period of photographic creativity that lasted a mere seven years. The works originating from this time (virtually all of them unique prints) vary between still life, political portrait or photo-reportage.

The ArteF gallery is exhibiting mostly vintage photographs from the second phase of work, which was devoted more to reportage. Suggestive portraits of the Mexican population alternate with prosaic shots of landscapes and are complemented by documentation on Diego Rivera's murals.

This is the first ever opportunity in Switzerland to become acquainted with the work of a photographer who is exhibited very rarely in Europe.

Frieda Kahlo, portrayed by Lola Alvarez Bravo and Leo Matiz, has, in recent decades, become a symbol of the centuries old bitter struggle of an entire country. She embodies like no other woman the tremendous will to live, even under the most difficult conditions, without making any concessions.

Although she was an established artist, with a body physically scarred following a car accident and involved in an unfulfilled love affair with Diego Rivera, the portraits on display at ArteF are neither sad nor resigned. In form they show the energy of a remarkable fighting spirit that goes way beyond the limits of the photograph. In contrast to her own pictures, the works exhibited here show Kahlo's unbridled pride and unbelievably mystical presence. An intense and powerful meeting with an artist who is world-famous for her self-critical art, is guaranteed.

Lucia Messeguer on the other hand, in her series originating from 1979, offsets the powerful works of Kahlo and Modotti. Her metaphor is that of a country between omnipotent history and personal fragility in today's Mexican community.

With photographs taken in two cloisters, her simple group of works evokes the charged tension between the isolated individual and what is, for far too many, the brutal social reality of this Moloch of a Mexico. Through her photographic lens, Lucia Messeguer combines the intensity of a Sugimoto with the vacuum of a Tarkovsky. A poetic influence can be felt in these buildings, which express the vulnerability of personal integrity in Mexico's melting pot of a society. Images between dream and reality, human sentimentality and walls steeped in history.

The exhibition is being sponsored by the Embajade de Mexico en Suiza in Berne and by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Zurich.

Tina Modotti
I put too much art in my life, consequently I have not much left to give to art. Tina Modotti to Edward Weston

Although it is sixty years since her unexplained death, Tina Modotti is still a legend without equal in the history of photography and is now being lauded as the 'undiscovered' photographer of the twentieth century. Her period of photographic creativity lasted a mere seven years (from 1923 to 1930) and her few photographs (400 pictures have been preserved, virtually all of them unique prints) are today very rare and scattered over many collections throughout the world. The intense drive for life and passion as well as her revolutionary convictions result in a life that is like a candle lit at both ends, so that as it gets shorter, it also burns more intensely. A light that burned in the darkest and most difficult decades of the last century.

Adelaide Luigia Modotti (Tina for short), the daughter of a mechanic, was born into a very large family in Udine in Italy on 17th August 1896. Little Tina's first contact with photography came from her uncle Piero Modotti, who ran a modest photographic studio. In 1913, the family emigrates to America (as did hundreds of thousands of others). Tina works first of all in a textile factory in San Francisco and later becomes a mannequin at I. Magnin. In 1915, at the international Panama-Pacific exhibition, she gets to know the poet and painter Roubaix del’ Abrie Richey (Robo for short), whom she marries two years later and follows to Los Angeles. She designs clothes using the batik technique and in 1920, wins her first Hollywood role in the silent film The Tiger’s Coat. Party girl Tina Modotti becomes acquainted during these excessive jazz years with the married photographer Edward Weston, with whom she has a year-long passionate love affair. In February 1922, Robo dies in Mexico from smallpox and Tina's father dies in San Francisco. But even though Mexico is wildly archaic at this time, following ten years of bloody revolution, it casts an irresistible spell on the artist. In July 1923, Weston and Modotti move to Mexico together and make an agreement: Tina runs the artist's studio and the household and Weston teaches her the rudiments of photography. They are soon the focus of the so-called Mexican Renaissance, an illustrious group of communist-minded intellectuals, headed by Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, Pablo Neruda, Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. In 1926, Weston leaves Mexico and goes back to his family in California and Tina shows that she is not just Weston's ministrant, but that she also has a highly sensitive and above all political photographic language of her own. She intensifies her friendship with Dorothea Lange and starts working on Anita Brenner’s Idols behind Altars. In the years that follow, it is possible to divide Modotti's work into three rough categories. From 1923 to 1926 the pictures are rich in form and as with Weston, are about simplicity. After Weston's return, Tina Modotti dwells on the world around her, on poverty, the beauty of the farmers' wives, the scenery, in general the history of a Mexico that is freeing itself from backwardness and is moving into 'the modern age'. This is all done with great empathy with regard to form and composition, in the Bauhaus style. In her last works (1928 to 1930) her gift for narrative becomes more pronounced and the artist examines more thoroughly the circumstances of the quite ordinary Mexican rural population.

I consider myself a photographer, nothing more. If my photographs differ from that which is usually done in this field, it is precisely because I try to produce not art but honest photographs, without distortions or manipulations. The majority of photographers still seek "artistic" effects, imitating other mediums of graphic expression. The result is a hybrid product that does not succeed in giving their work the most valuable characteristic it should have - photographic quality.
Tina Modotti, Mexican Folkways, Vol. 5 No. 4, 1929

In 1928, she gets to know the Cuban revolutionary Julio Mella with whom she enjoys an ostentatious love affair. She meets communist journalists and the secret agent Vittorio Vidali for the first time and intensifies the ties of friendship with Frida Kahlo. Kahlo meets the love of her life, Diego Rivera, when with Tina and the two of them got married in August 1929. This year also marks the turning point in what has so far been the illustrious life of Tina Modotti. On the evening of 10th January 1929, two gunshots are fired at Julio Mella while he is out walking in the street with Tina and he dies a few hours later. The exact circumstances of his death are still unclear today, but because of her conflicting statements, the artist was under suspicion of murder. In December, she opens an exhibition at the Universidad Nacional Auto'noma de Me'xico, with the militant communist images of a photo-reportage from the province of Tehuantepec.

Whether or not photography may or may not be a work of art comparable to other plastic creation has been much discussed in recent years. Naturally, opinions differ. There are those who do accept photography as a medium of expression on a par with any other and there are others who continue to look myopically at the twentieth century with eighteenth century eyes, incapable of accepting the manifestations of our mechanical civilisation. But, for us who use the camera as a tool just as the painter does his brushes, adverse opinions do not matter. We have the approbation of those who recognise the merits of photography in its multiple aspects and accept it as the most eloquent, the most direct means for fixing, for registering the present epoch.
Tina Modotti, Mexican Folkways, Vol. 5 No. 4, 1929

Shortly after this, on 5th February 1930, when six shots are fired at the new reactionary President of Mexico Pasqual Ortiz Rubio, Tina Modotti, or at least the communist circles in which she moved, come under suspicion. As a consequence, she is ruthlessly deported from Mexico. She finds her feet again initially in the Netherlands and in Germany, particularly as Vittorio Vidali helps her to get photographic work with weekly magazines. In the same year, she shoots her last photograph, in Berlin, for Willy Munzberger's Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung.

She can no longer reconcile photography with her communist work: I can not solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art is the reason she gives. A life 'in transit' for Communism begins. She travels on to Moscow, where, together with Vidali (so rumour has it) she works in Stalin's secret service. In 1935, after their time together in Moscow, we find Tina and Vidali back in Warsaw, Vienna, Madrid and Paris, where they work for the communist relief organisation Red Aid. From 1936, under the assumed name of Maria, Tina becomes involved in the struggle against Fascism in Spain. In 1937 and 1938, she organises two international conventions for "Intellectuals against Fascism" in Valencia and Madrid. She helps in hospitals, edits volumes of prose and poetry and becomes friendly with Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, Hemingway, Malraux and many of the other intellectuals of the time.

When Franco captures Madrid in 1939, Tina and Vidali flee over the Pyrenees to Paris, where they are both able to book a passage to New York on the Queen Mary. But the USA rejects her entry application and cynically enough, Tina, as a refugee of the Spanish Civil War, is granted asylum in the same Mexico that had thrown her out nine years previously. The ex-artist works as a translator and for the Alleanza Internazionale Giuseppe Garibaldini in Mexico. Just three years later, in 1942, she dies under mysterious circumstances in Mexico City. Was it a taxi accident? A Stalin poisoning against rebel Trotskyites? Or a heart defect? The irony of fate: at the end, the profession listed in her passport was 'housewife'.

Puro es tu dulce nombre, pura es tu fra'gil vida: de abeja, sombra, fuego, nieve silencio espuma,de acero, li'nea polense construyo' tu fe'rrea, tu delgada estructura...

(Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life: bees, shadows, fire, snow and foam, combined with steel and wire and pollen to make up your firm and delicate being…)
Extract from the poem Tina Modotti by Pablo Neruda, 1942

Nowadays Tina Modotti is regarded as one of the most outstanding women of the twentieth century. In 1991, a still life with roses (the artist was just 28 years old at the time) was bought for US$ 167,000 at Sotheby’s in San Francisco by the co-founder of Esprit, Susie Tompkins (which is still a record price for a photograph). This sale was the making of the extremely rare photographs on the international art market in the years that followed. Susie Tompkins Buell now owns several of Modotti's works, as does the singer Madonna, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the respected George Eastman House, Rochester, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Collections FNAC, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Library and the Tate Modern in London, and there are individual works in many private collections.

This exhibition marks the first public showing of Tina Modotti's work in Switzerland.

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Lucia Messeguer

Lucia Messeguer studied photography and graphic design at the Escuela de Diseno Grafico y Fotografia in Mexico City. Today she is still working as a freelance photographer for various clients throughout the world and has been living in Singapore since 1996. She has consolidated her knowledge of photography over the years by teaching photography, by working in museums and by editing photographic volumes, as well as extending it by taking a course in music theory. Whether portraits, fashion, travel reportage or commercial photography, Lucia Messeguer is quite at home in all these areas. The artist is very proud of having founded the first free school in Mexico City to concern itself exclusively with the medium of photography.

The pictures, which she disassociates from her chosen way of earning a living as a press and commercial photographer, are works of tranquillity, intensity and concentration. The works of this Mexican photographer are composed with an almost musical ear. When you look at her landscapes in Hokkaido, you are reminded of Mahler and the pictures originating from the Zurich Forch are reminiscent of a light Schumann. The photographs being exhibited at ArteF are poetically playful, like Debussy's Preludes, yet also have the exceptional exquisiteness of a Tarkovsky.

Biography

1996-2006 Freelance photographer for various clients, Singapore
1997-2000 Course in music theory at the Royal School of Music, Singapore
1984-1986 ISSTE (Medical Institute), Mexico City Press photographer
1980-1983 Manager of the photographic department at the National Centre of Productivity, Mexico City
1980-1983 Freelance photographer for various museums, publishers and banks in Mexico City
1979-1980 Photographer at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City
1977-1978 Photographer for Corporacion Editorial SA, Mexico City
1975-1978 Teacher of photography in Mexico City
1972-1975 Training at the Escuela de Diseno Grafico y Fotografia, Mexico City,
1969-1972 Academic training at the Colegio Madrid, Mexico City

Her cycles of work have already been exhibited in Mexico, the USA, France, Switzerland and Singapore.

Press Preview: Thursday, 2nd February 2006, h 10.00 to 18.00. Mrs. Lucia Messeguer will be present from 14.00

Opening: February 2

ArteF Galerie
Splugenstrasse 11- Zuric
Hours: Tuesday-Friday, 13.00 to 18.00, Saturday, 11.00 to 16.00

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