Mexico as Muse: Tina Modotti and Edward Weston

Tuesday, 03 October 2006 22:44

San Francisco, CA - The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present the exhibition Mexico as Muse: Tina Modotti and Edward Weston.  The exhibition is organized by Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography at SFMOMA. On exhibit until 2 January, 2007.

For five years in the 1920s, two of the major figures in 20^th century art, Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, shared a passionate partnership.  They also shared a love for Mexico, where they lived and worked together from 1923 until 1926, each making pictures of astonishing beauty and ambition.  This exhibition presents 89 photographs created during their time together in Mexico, images that count among the most memorable from each artist’s career, demonstrating the pair’s uncompromising standards for their medium.  Also included in the exhibition are a variety of archival materials—letters, postcards, photographs, and ephemera—sent to members of Modotti’s family, which will allow viewers to compare everyday uses of photography in Modotti and Weston’s lives, in books, as postcards, and in newspapers with celebrated examples of their photographic art.

Modotti and Weston came from radically different backgrounds, yet each was an important catalyst in the other’s artistic development.  Born in Italy in 1896, Modotti had received little formal education before immigrating to San Francisco to join the rest of her family in 1913.  She worked as a seamstress and an actress in the local Italian theater, then moved with her husband, the artist Robo de Richey, to Los Angeles, where they became members of a burgeoning community of bohemian artists, poets, and socialists.  In Los Angeles in 1921 Modotti met and began a romantic relationship with Weston, a fashionable portrait photographer with an ambition to make art.