Black and White and Red All Over 
Roses.Photograph by Tina Modotti, 1925
Seeing through the eyes of Tina Modotti
This month's Saint has been chosen not only for the beauty of her art but because her life itself is a reminder, an exhortation to live free and true, a primer on loving only and exactly whom you wish--a postcard from a life shortly and heatedly lived for politics, art, beauty, and with a deepness of human affection.
Photographer Tina Modotti may have learned her craft as the result of being Edward Weston's lover and one of his many models, but the pure juice of her life ripened not from her beauty but from the very vital spirit and empathetic humanity that illuminated her actions and her work.
An Italian immigrant, Modotti came to San Francisco in 1913 with her mother and siblings to join her father, already established in the U.S. The young woman quickly became involved in the vibrant local Italian theatrical scene, living an exuberantly bohemian life, and arranging a marriage based on passion and free thinking with the painter and poet Roubaix de l'Abrie Richey. The couple eventually moved away from their families to Los Angeles, and Modotti sought work in film, a medium whose silent screen didn't care that her English accent was thick and new, but rather sought out her dark beauty.
Photograph by Edward Weston, 1923
The two lived an unconventional life: they and their friends wrote, painted, acted, sang, and drank. They were featured in daring magazine spreads, the couple typifying young boho craftsmanship of the early 1920s. Modotti, petite and dark with a gracefulness of manner that is said by her friends to have caused men to fall in love with her seemingly against their will, was at the center of their set.
And then she met Weston. Married with four children, Weston was already then a renowned photographer and womanizer. He became close to Modotti and Richey, he and Modotti becoming lovers. They fought, made up, had innumerable parties fueled by political talk and the hanging of new work, made photographs and poems and paintings, lived on pennies and yet traveled extensively, the three of them discovering a love for Mexico and its burgeoning socialist principles that Modotti would carry all her life.
Photograph by Tina Modotti, c. 1924
All, however, was not a scarlet-hued Warren Beatty film: Richey died of smallpox while working in Mexico. There to bury him, Modotti fell in love with the heat and dusty langour of Mexico City. Weston and Modotti lived in and traveled the country, inevitably drifting apart, although they corresponded for the rest of her life. Modotti also fell in love with Mexico's political stirrings and the strong, bold muralistic myth-making of Diego Rivera and David Siquieros. Befriending the artists and revolutionaries of that city, she is said to have taught painter Frida Kahlo how to dress and did become the lover of the great martyr of the Mexican Revolution, Julio Mella.
Framed for Mella's murder, which occurred while the couple were walking home after a political meeting--Mella being shot by a Cuban renegade--Modotti survived both the scandal and the heartbreak. Unable to bear children, she cleaved her life instead to the principles that grew just as inevitably as a child inside her. She began to photograph full time, seeking out the women and the workers of the countryside; capturing flowers whose gelatin-ghosts influenced the botanical shots of the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; and she eventually immersed herself in a passion for another political leader and with the Communist party itself.
Photograph by Tina Midotti, c. 1925
Ousted from Mexico after being acquitted of Mella's murder, Modotti was returned by its government straight into the dark days of Mussolini's Italy. From there she traveled to Germany, a country just tightening its guts for Hitler's first nightmare of triumph. Travelling south, she played an instrumental role in the Spanish Civil War. With her lover, a high-ranking Communist leader, she went to Russia, finally returning to Mexico in the early 1940s, where she died at the age of 46 in the back of a cab taking her home from a late-night dinner party, the victim of her own great heart.
Stripping aside our views of the romantic trappings of early-century Bohemianism, its seemingly misguided innocence about the importance of art and politics in daily life, its happily drunken parties, its high-cholesterol dinners--all of those simple pleasures of living that we now seem to be so afraid--is the honest, rapacious exuberance that Modotti displayed toward her own life.
If she wanted a lover, she took one, and she did it in complete faith and honesty. If she wanted to photograph, she took one, again--as an act of faith and honesty. And as a politicized artist who believed so desperately in the ideals of utopian government, Modotti allowed her life to be shaped by her times and the principles of freedom so terrifically fought for in those times.
Amid the profane squallings of the South Park generation, where today do we find those whose small lives will tomorrow loom large from the pages of biography, those who are content to live without material comforts in order to supplement their own souls? Those who are so old-fashioned as to work for the common good?
Because when the very concept of working for the common good seems quaint, sounding merely like a recommended child-rearing technique, then perhaps we have all come zooming too far up the wrong ladder in this stringently narrow climb to the century's end. Where Modotti and her set made their own entertainment and lived their own politics, we today are content to receive our entertainment and view our politics with an alarming passivity.
Be a saint: Grab your life. Feel the treacherous vertigo.
--Gretchen Giles
Sainthood is for sinners, too. Send us your idea for next month's saint and we'll haul out the halo spray and glitter up some wings.
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Tina on the azotea.
Edward Weston with his Seneca.
Calla lilies.