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Artist or Maker: TINA MODOTTI (1896-1942)
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Provenance: Robert Miller Gallery, New York
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Literature: Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, 1935, front cover; Constantine, Tina Modotti: A Fragile Life, Chronicle Books, 1993, p. 133 (variant cropping); Lowe, Tina Modotti: Photographs, Harry N. Abrams/Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1995, pl. 94; Tina Modotti: Photographs, Robert Miller Gallery, 1997, pl. 11; Stourdze, Tina Modotti: The Mexican Renaissance, Jean-Michel Place, 2000; Figarella, Edward Weston y Tina Modotti en Mexico, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 2002, fig. 53, p. 177; Lowe, Tina Modotti and Edward Weston: The Mexico Years, Merrell, 2004, pp. 77, 117
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Notes: This charming portrait is poised between the abstract and modernist works of her early period under the influence of Edward Weston and her socially concerned activist work related to her interest in the Communist Party, which she joined in 1927. It is perfectly composed in simple, bold geometric shapes, brightly lit and seen much like Weston's shells of the same year. But Modotti must have knelt down to achieve this low viewpoint looking up at the boy's face--a standard ploy, in cinema and social realist painting, as well, to make the figure appear noble and heroic. The boy's sombrero thus forms a halo to further idealize him as angelic. Modotti made this photograph in the year after Weston had returned to California. She continued to document Mexican Art and to publish in Mexican Folkways but she began to work more frequently for the leftist El Machete and all her activities became more overtly political.
