Portrait of Tina Modotti, Glendale

Just prior to a pivotal time in his career when he left his commercial, pictorialist style behind in California and ventured into modernism in Mexico, Weston met Tina Modotti in 1920. Meeting Weston, for her too, would prove a life changing event. Her husband, Roubaix de l'Abbe de Richey (Robo) was in Mexico organizing an exhibition of American artist's and photographers at the Academa Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City to open in March, 1922 when he fell seriously ill. Upon hearing of Robo's illness, Tina traveled to Mexico with a number of Weston's prints to be included in the show, only to arrive too late to join her ailing husband who died of smallpox. Robo, never having seen his exhibition efforts come to fruition, left his wife free to embark on a new life with Weston. While at the opening of the exhibition in March, Tina met the director of the Academy, Alfredo Ramos Martnez to whom she inscribed this portrait. At a time of loss and grief for Modotti Martnez must have been an empathetic companion to her. The print is inscribed in her native Italian, perhaps in recognition of the fourteen years Martnez spent in Europe.

Martnez (1875-1946) was the director of the Academa Nacional de Bellas Artes from 1911-1914 and again in the 1920s. In 1920 he founded the "Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre" in the village of Santa Anita, southeast of Mexico City. Modeled after the Barbizon School, the students were encouraged to paint from life outdoors.

This early portrait of Tina, still very much in Weston's pictorialist style - romantic with soft focus and higlights - offers a glimpse of their future together. Tina, cloaking her body yet offering a revealing and sensuous glance, betrays her innocence of the past. Entering a much more poignant period in her life, she and Weston went on to share a new form of photography, friends and politics.

Another print of this image is in the Sondra Gilman Collection.