Tina Modotti  (Italian, 1896-1942) 

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896–1942) was a remarkable model, actress, photographer, and political activist. Her captivating photographs and eye for planes, lines, shapes, and structures have given her international recognition among the early 20th-century artists who shaped the Modern Pictorial movement. Modotti is remembered for pictorial works that employed combinations of curves and shadows, as well as space and void, to provide unique portraits and still life pictures. Born in Udine, Italy, the artist moved to the United States and settled with her father in San Francisco, CA, in 1913.

Modotti was only 16 years old and soon became a leading actress in the local Italian theatre. She was also a well-known figure in the Los Angeles Bohemian culture. Her acting and photography career had already blossomed by 1920.

On a trip to bury her husband, who died in Mexico in 1922, Modotti encountered the artistic works of Mexican muralists and was strongly attracted to the Mexican cultural renaissance of the 1920s. She teamed up with the renowned photographer Edward Weston (American, 1886–1958), and they opened a portrait studio and were quite influential in the revitalization of the Mexican artistic movement of the early 1920s. Their Mexican studio became a point of convergence for artists, writers, and political activists.

Modotti's major achievement was in capturing scenes of Mexico at the nation's most vibrant period; her photographs combined the artistic form with the social context of the time. Her involvement with radical politics led to public slander after she was linked to the shooting of her Cuban lover, but she was acquitted of the charges and expelled from Mexico in 1930. Modotti's work was rediscovered in the United States in 1996, and exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2010, the largest exhibition of her work was opened in Vienna at the Kunst Haus Wien. Other notable works by Modotti include In the Arsenal, which was exhibited in 1928 at the Secretaría de Educación Pública Building, Mexico City, Mexico, and the The Abundant Earth, which is exhibited at the National Agricultural School in Chapingo, Mexico. Modotti died of a heart attack in 1942 while living in Mexico City.