Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Tina Modotti: Photographer who led a Controversial Life

Edward Weston
Tina Modotti
ca 1925
Gelatin Silver Print
Nicknamed Assuntina, and later Tina, Tina Modotti was born in UdineFriuli, Italy, the daughter of an Italian machinist who immigrated to the United States in 1906. Despite her rudimentary formal education, Modotti focused on intellectual matters. She grew up among the working poor and politically motivated. Modotti toiled in a textile factory before joining her father in 1913 in San Francisco, where she worked as a seamstress and dressmaker. Attracted to the lively performing arts scene in the Italian emigre community in the San Francisco Bay Area, Modotti tried acting. Her striking appearance and artistic modes of expression led to brief careers in the theater,  opera, and even silent films during the late 1910s and early 1920s. She worked as an artist's model as well.

Modotti married American painter and poet Roubaix "Robo" del L'Abrie Richey in 1918 and the couple moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the burgeoning motion picture industry. Modotti met photographer Edward Weston and his assistant Margrethe Mather and, by 1921, she was his favorite model and his lover by the end of that year. Robo left Los Angeles for Mexico where he died of smallpox while on vacation two days before she arrived.
Edward Weston
Tina Modotti
ca 1925
Photograph
Gelatin Silver Print

When Weston moved to Mexico City two years later in 1923, Modotti became first his assistant, apprentice and eventually his partner in a joint photographic enterprise. The close-up vantage points and lack of context in her early work attest to the influence of Weston and his emphasis on “the thing itself,” but, as Modotti gained experience, her images took on a personal character. The couple embraced the capitol's bohemian scene and used their connections to begin a portrait business.

When Weston returned to California  in 1926, Modotti stayed behind. In 1927 she joined the Communist Party, and her political affiliations and activities changed the direction of her work. She published her images, including portrait studies, in the magazines Mexican FolkwaysFormas, and the more radical El Machete

Tina Modotti
A proud little agrarista or better son of one 
ca 1927
Gelatin Silver Print
Modotti became the photographer for the Mexican mural movement and documented the works of such artists as Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. In addition, she experimented with architectural interiors, flowers, and urban landscapes, especially with her poetic portraits of peasants and workers. 

Modotti's one-woman show at the National Library held in December 1929 was advertised as "The First Revolutionary Photographic Exhibition in Mexico." The apex of her career as a photographer would quickly plummet within a year.


Tina Modotti
Market Scene
ca 1927
Gelatin Silver Print
Political and economic issues in Mexico, Central and South America intensified with repression of political dissidents. Modotti's comrade and companion Julio Antonio Mella was assassinated by what were assumed to be agents of the Cuban government in January 1929 and shortly thereafter, an attempt was made on the president. Modotti-target of both the Mexican and Italian police-was questioned about both crimes during a a concerted anti-Communist, anti-immigrant press campaign that depicted her as the "fierce and bloody Tina Modotti," perpetrator of the crimes. 

As a result of the anti-Communist campaign by the Mexican government, Modotti was expelled from the country in 1930 and placed under guard on a ship bound for Rotterdam. The Italian government repeatedly attempted extradition but she managed to evade it by her connections with International Red Aid Activists. Modotti's limited visa allowed for her final destination to be Italy. She stopped in Germany and Switzerland on her way there and was convinced by the deteriorating situation in Germany to move to Moscow in 1931. 
Tina Modotti
Woman of Tehuantepec
ca 1929
Gelatin Silver Print
The Italian government repeatedly attempted extradition but she managed to evade it by her connections with International Red Aid Activists. During the next several years, Modotti worked for various missions on behalf of the International Workers' organizations and the Comintern in Europe. When the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936, she left Moscow for Spain where she stayed until 1939. Following the collapse of the Republican movement in Spain, Modotti returned to Mexico under a pseudonym and avoided contact with her former comrades. She died of heart failure in Mexico City under what some believe are suspicious circumstances. Her brief career in photography lasted only seven years, but Modotti produced a body of work that included evocative images.  


Tina Modotti
Hands of the Puppeteer
ca 1929
Gelatin Silver Print
Tina Modotti
Misery
ca 1928
Gelatin Silver Print

Tina Modotti
Pinatas
ca 1926
Gelatin Silver Print
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Sources
1. The Web Museum, Tina Modotti, Biography, http://www.modotti.com/?page_id=5, retrieved May 26, 2015.
2. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Reading Room, Women Photojournalists, Tina Modotti, http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/womphotoj/modottiessay.html, retrieved May 26, 2015.
3. Encyclopedia Britannica, Tina Modotti, Italian Photographer, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1160291/Tina-Modotti, retrieved May 26, 2015.
4. George Eastman House, Still Photograph Archive, http://www.geh.org/ar/strip87/htmlsrc3/modotti_sld00001.html, retrieved May 26, 2015.


Monday, May 18, 2015

Isabelle Clark Percy: Artist and co-founder of the California College of Arts and Crafts

Isabelle Clark Percy West
(Center)
At her namesake Isabel West Gallery
  Campus of the California College of Arts and Crafts
ca. 1958-59 
Isabelle Clark Percy was a painter, lithographer, etcher and a liberated woman of her times. Born in Alameda, California on November 6, 1882, she was the daughter of prominent architect George W. Percy, designer of the Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, the Hobart Building in San Francisco, and the Christian Brothers Winery in Sonoma. Isabelle studied art at the Mark Hopkins Institute from 1901 to 1905 under Arthur Mathews, with Brangwyn in London, and with Dow and Snell in New York. 

Along with Perham Nahl and Frederick Meyer, Percy founded the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in about 1907, and for many years she taught there as a Professor of Design. Over the course of her career, Isabelle designed book plates and worked in oil, pastel, watercolor, and color lithography and in 1915, won a bronze medal for her lithography at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Isabelle continued to teach at the college until her retirement in 1941 at which time a gallery, which is still in use on the campus, was named in her honor.

In 1916, Isabelle married George Parsons West, a San Francisco historian and journalist, and settled into a home that she built across the bay in Sausalito where she maintained a studio and continued to paint. The couple divorced in 1934. Following residency in Brooklyn and New York City, until 1920, she returned to the California School of Arts and Crafts from 1921-1942. Isabelle was a member of the San Francisco Art Association and the California Society of Etchers. Her work was exhibited in Paris, Germany, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago in addition to the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco. 

Percy produced a large body of work of both California Themes and of subjects viewed during trips to Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado. She created landscapes, seascapes, and trees in Marin and Monterey counties, studies of adobes, Bay Area scenes and landmarks, views of the missions, and Mother Lode Country themes. She worked until her death in nearby Greenbrae on August 15, 1976. 

Isabel Clark Percy 
Maartjie and Neltjie in the Yard
ca. 1913
Oil on canvas board
16 x 12 3/4 inches
Isabelle Clark Percy
European Street Scene
ca. 1913?
Pastel
Isabel Clark Percy
Cervantes Inn, Toledo, Spain
ca. 1914
13 5/8 x 10 7/8 inches
Color lithograph
Isabelle Clark Percy
Carmel California
ca. 1913?
Pencil and pastel on paper
12 x 9 inches
Isabelle Clark Percy
House Beautiful Cover
ca. 1928
Watercolor, gouache, and pencil on paper
20 3/8 x 15 3/ 4 inches
Member: San Francisco Sketch Club; San Francisco Art Ass'n; California Society of Etchers. Exhibited: Guild of Arts & Crafts, 1904; Starr King Fraternity, 1905; Del Monte Art Gallery (Monterey), 1908, 1909; Paris Salon, 1911 (honorable mention); Sorosis Club, 1913; California Society of Etchers, 1913; Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915 (bronze medal); California Artists, Golden Gate Park Museum, 1915; San Francisco Art Ass'n, 1916-25; Oakland Art Gallery, 1932; California College of Arts and Crafts, 1973 (solo). Works held: California Historical Society; Oakland Museum; California College of Arts and Crafts.

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Sources
Sylvia Moore, ed., Yesterday and Tomorrow, California Women Artists, Midmarch Arts Press, New York, 1989, p. 69.
Edan Milton Hughes, Specializing in the Art of Early California, http://www.edanhughes.com/biography.cfm?ArtistID=720, retrieved May 19, 2015.
The Annex Galleries, 19th, 20th, and 21st Century Fine Prints, Isabel Percy West Biography, http://www.annexgalleries.com/artists/biography/1854/West/Isabel, retrieved May 19, 2015.
Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki Kovinick, An Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West, University of Texas Press, 1998.
Isabelle Percy West, askART, http://www.askart.com/artist_bio/Isabelle_Percy_West/6009/Isabelle_Percy_West.aspx#, retrieved May 19, 2015.