Tina Modotti (Italian 1896–1942) was an Italian photographer, model, silent film actress, and leftist activist. Edward Weston in Mexico, 1923 Weston, photo.

Tina Modotti (Italian 1896–1942) was an Italian photographer, model, silent film actress, and leftist activist.

Edward Weston in Mexico, 1923

Weston, photo of Modotti taken in Mexico, mid-1920s

Still from movie, Frida: dramatizing the Kahlo and Modotti friendship.

Edward Weston, Nude, 1927, gelatin silver print

Edward Weston, Pepper # 30, 1930. Gsp.

Tina Modotti, Mexico Lily, platinum print, 1925

Rivera, In The Arsenal, fresco detail, 1928 with Tina Modotti on far right

Tina Modotti, Campesinos, 1926; (right) Reading El Machete, 1927

Private Worlds and Public MythsThe “Fantastic” in Latin American Art

Aztec brazier c. 1300 C.E.

European Surrealism Circa 1921 – 1940

"Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella

on a dissection table.“

- Lautréamont

Les chants de Maldoror

The Surrealist Revolution (left) Photomontage for La Révolution Surréaliste, no.12, 1929 by

René Magritte (Belgian, 1898-1967), Enquête sur l'amour’ (Inquiry on Love)(bottom right) Surrealist group, Paris, 1930, L-R: Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, André Breton, Hans Arp, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, René Crevel, Man Ray

(left) The World in the Time of the Surrealists, Brussels, 1929

"We are determined to make a Revolution." "We have joined the word surrealism to the word revolution solely to show the

disinterested, detached and even entirely desperate character of this revolution." - André Breton

(right) Easter Island, Polynesia, ceremonial dance paddle (rapa) from André Breton’s collection of Oceanic art. It represents a highly stylized male figure with Janus-face head and phallic finial showing retracted foreskin.

Precursors to Surrealism: 19th Century Romanticism and Symbolism (left) Arnold Bocklin, The Isle of the Dead, 1880, oil on canvas, Symbolism (right) Francisco Goya, Saturn, 1821-1823, fresco remounted on canvas, Romanticism

Surrealist strategies to access the unconscious:(left) Cadavre Exquis, 1926 by Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky). (American, 1890-1976),

Joan Miró. (Spanish, 1893-1983), Max Morise and Yves Tanguy. (American, born France. 1900-1955)

(right) André Masson (French Surrealist), Automatic Drawing, c. 1923

Yves Tanguy (American, b. France,1900-1955), Mama, Papa Is Wounded!, 1927. Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 28 3/4"

Rufino Tamayo (Mexican, 1899-1991), Animals, oil on canvas, 30X40”, 1941, MoMA NYC. Tamayo was a Zapotecan Indian painter born in Oaxaca of Mestizo parents. He spent 1926-29 and 1938-49 in New York City, 1949-59 in Paris, then returned permanently to Oaxaca

Rufino Tamayo, Insomnia, 1958, oil on canvas, 38 ½ x 57”

Tamayo, Woman in Gray, 1959, oil on canvas, 195 X 129.5 cm

Rufino Tamayo (Mexican, 1899-1991), n.d. Man Bird, oil and sand on canvas, 32 x 39 inches

Three Personages, by Rufino Tamayo, a 1970 oil and sand on canvas painting, in an undated image released to the media on Oct. 22, 2007. This painting, stolen 20 years ago, was found in an upper West Side NYC garbage bin and sold for 1$ million. Tamayo’s work tops at 3$ million.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican 1902-2002)Ladder of Ladders, 1931, silver gelatin print

“The worst thing that you can do is to title a photograph 'Untitled,' because then it has no differentiation from any other picture....”

- Bravo

Bravo, Public Thirst, 1934, silver gelatin print, Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Bravo, Optical Parable, 1931, silver gelatin print

Bravo, Wooden Horse, n.d., silver gelatin print

Bravo, The Dreamer, 1931, silver gelatin print, collection Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Bravo, Mannequins Laughing, 1930, silver gelatin print, collection Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Bravo, Striking Worker Murdered, 1934, silver gelatin print

Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907-1954) What the Water Yields Me, oil on canvas,1938

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, wedding photograph, 1929. They were twenty years apart in age.

Frida Kahlo, My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree), 1936oil and tempera on metal panel, 30.7 x 34.5 cm, MoMA, NYC

Aztec goddess Tlazolteotl in the act of childbirth. Goddess of sexual desire and mother of the corn god.

Kahlo, My Birth, 1932, oil on metal. 31 x 35 cm. Private collection

Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital (Detroit), 1932, oil on metal (her first painting on tin), 12 x 15.5 in, with (left) Mexican ex-voto, oil on tin, 1878, 14" x 10“

'The only artist in the history of art who tore open her chest and heart to reveal the biological truth of her feelings.‘ - Rivera

Kahlo, Self-Portrait on the Border Between Mexico and the United States1932, oil on tin, 12 x 13”

Frida Kahlo, Two Fridas, 1939, o/c, 68 x 68”, Museo de Arte Moderno, MCPainted for the 1940 International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City during her separation and divorce from Diego Rivera. Manuel Alvarez Bravo also showed in the 1940 Surrealist Exhibition with Rivera, Matta, ancient Mexican art, and the Europeans – Arp, Picasso, Giacometti, Ernst, Moore.

The art of Frida Kahlo-Rivera is a ribbon around a bomb.André Breton

Kahlo, Marxism Will Bring Health to the Sick, 1954, the year of her death.

“I hope the exit is joyful - and I hope never to come back – Frida” (last entry in diary)

Maria Izquierdo (Mexican, 1906-1955), Self Portrait, 1940(?)

Maria Izquierdo, Adornments, c. 1941, oil on canvas, 70x100cm, Mexico City

María Izquierdo, Red Snapper, 1943, oil on celotex, 61 x 61 cm, Banco Nacional de México collection, Mexico

The Caribbean

Hector Hyppolite (Haitian, 1894-1948) Agoue and his Consort, 1945-8, oil on board, 62 x 77cm. French-African fusion. Agoue is the vodou god of the sea. Hyppolite was a third-generation houngan (vodou priest) and a shoemaker and house painter by trade.

Hector Hyppolite’s Port-au-Prince studio with Agoue and his Consort on the easel, 1946-48. Hyppolite painted with brushes made of chicken feathers and furniture enamel.

Hector Hyppolite, The Great Master, 1946-48, oil on cardboard, 37 x 25 in.

Hector Hyppolite (1894-1948), St Francis and the Christ Child, 1946-1948, oil on board, 71.7 56.5 cm., Milwaukee Art Museum

Vodou altar, Museo Nacional de Guanabacoa, Cuba

Wifredo Lam (Cuban-born French Painter, 1902-1982) , The Jungle, 1943gouache on paper mounted on canvas, 94 1/4 x 90 1/2“

“. . .beings in passage from a vegetal state to that of an animal still charged with vestiges of the forest”

- Lam

Wifredo Lam in Marseille waiting to escape to the Caribbean from Nazi France, 1940

Lam in Havana studio, 1947

Lam, academic study painted in Madrid, 1925. Lam spent 18 years in Europe (1923-41) before creating his signature paintings in Cuba during WWII.

Wifredo Lam, Mother and Child, 1939 (in Paris), gouache on paper, 41 x 29"

(left) Wifredo Lam, The Casting of the Spell, 1947, oil on burlap, 43 1/8 x 36 in(right) Picasso, Woman in a Chair, 1929

“I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks. In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters.” (Lam) Aesthetic of NEGRITUDE – AIME CESAIRE

Wifredo Lam, The Idol, 1944, oil on canvas, 158 X 127 cm, Caracas

Installation view, 2006, Museum of Modern Art NYCWifredo Lam’s Jungle, 1943

with Louise Bourgeois’s Quarantania, 1948

Leonora Carrington (British-born Mexican Surrealist painter and writer, born in 1917), Self Portrait, 1936. Carrington emigrated to Mexico in 1942 and stayed.

Carrington and Max Ernst, France, c. 1940

Roberto Matta Echaurren (Chile, 1911-2002), Invasion of the Night, 1941, oil on canvas, 96 x 152 cm, SFMoMA. An “inscape” in which evocative forms are meant as visual analogies for the artist's psyche.“ Freudian mind space.

Roberto Matta, Psychological Morphology, ca. 1938. Matta emigrated to the New York in 1939-1949 and was a major influence on Abstract Expressionism.