Column: Photography
by David Raymond

Modernists in Mexico
Viva Mexico! Edward Weston and His Contemporaries

In 1923, when Edward Weston closed his portrait studio in Tropico, California, leaving his wife and three of his four sons to move to Mexico City, he wrote that he was leaving “to start a new life.” With him were his oldest son Chandler and his lover Tina Modotti. Modotti, an Italian-born actress, ran Weston’s studio and assisted him in becoming a part of the vibrant artistic community of Mexico City. Weston’s new life became an engagement with the broader cultural newness of Modernism. Viva Mexico! Edward Weston and His Contemporaries presents rarely-seen photographs by Weston and others from the Lane Collection, which is housed at the Museum of Fine Arts, and from the Museum’s own holdings. Many of these are pivotal images in Modernism’s photographic canon.

Tina on the Azotea, 1924, is an embodiment of Weston’s new life and his foray into the Modernist project. The subject is Tina Modotti, seen from above, lying in an angular twist on a serape in the strong and highly contrasting shadow and sunlight on the roof of their studio. The serape is in an angled opposition to the edges of the photograph, and Modotti extends this quiet spatial anarchy by appearing to crawl away from the structure toward the top of the image. The body is not exactly depersonalized—volition is suggested—but does become a sensuous element in the mechanics of a contained geometry.

Weston’s travels beyond the United States borders were limited to Mexico. Fortunately for him, Mexico City had become an American Paris outpost. The artists Weston and Modotti befriended included muralist Diego Rivera, who was an active contributor to the Paris art scene as well as a friend of Picasso, painters Jean Charlot, Xavier Guerrero, and Rafael Salas, poet Luis Quintanilla, and writer D.H. Lawrence, among others.

Having been a portrait photographer in California, in Mexico Weston produced a series of close-up monumental portrait heads. Rose Rolando (Covarrubias), 1926, is a remarkable blend of personal insight and abstract harmonics. The subject is starkly symmetrical—the shadow at the base of her neck echoes the pattern of braided hair at the sides of her head. This photograph speaks to the humane possibility within photography’s mechanics: Rose smiles with her eyes closed, her lids shutting out the intrusion of light, of the ‘other.’ The image is both open and private.

Weston’s portraits and figurative work evolved in this new environment, enriched by the support and encouragement he received from Rivera, David Siqueiros, and Charlot, and certainly from Modotti herself, who was developing her own strongly political vision.

The Mexican Modernists incorporated an interest in folk art, as did Modotti in her work, which may have encouraged Weston to photograph singular iconic objects, especially such items as folk toys. Jean Charlot collected Mexican folk art, seeing it as a “more radically abstract language than any of those used by modern artists.” Weston saw an affinity with Brancusi’s sculpture in indigenous art and his encounters with these in Charlot’s collection inspired Weston’s radicalized simplifications in pursuit of “the very essence of form.” El Pajaro Y El Canasto, 1926, showing the folk artist’s transformation of a gourd into a heron prefigures Weston’s later formal transformations, such as his photographs of peppers that read like human figures.

In addition to examples of Modotti’s work, there are pictures by Paul Strand, and two striking single image works by Edward’s son, Brett Weston, made when he was fourteen years old. The only Mexican-born photographer included is Manuel Alvarez Bravo, who met Modotti after Weston’s final departure. Bravo admired the work of both photographers and went on to have an important career photographing nudes. His El soñador (The Dreamer), 1931, is a compelling image of interiority in its representation of a young man asleep in a public space.

Weston made beautiful pictures of human bodies, compressing their forms to an exquisite physics, while finding their humanity primarily in his portraits. His achievement in landscape and cityscape images incorporated a more deeply realized intellectual experience. Desde La Azotea, 1924, another image made from his studio roof is a fragmented observation of adjacent structures and spaces, patterned with iron stairs, windows, a reversed arch, and angled shadows. The subject is so straightforward as a visual experience, so normal, that one would not expect it to be photographed. In this work Weston joined Cubist formal invention with his personal vision, securing an image of complex and compressed space that was waiting to become art.

David Raymond, sculptor, painter, and poet, is professor of fine arts and director of the McCoy Gallery at Merrimack College, North Andover, MA. He has written for Art New England since 1985.

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