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Trying to Develop the Next Cult Hero

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TIMES ART WRITER

Move over Frida. Make way for Tina.

Just as Frida Kahlo, once known mainly as Mexican muralist Diego Rivera’s wife, has become a cult figure whose paintings command more than $1 million at auction, Tina Modotti is shedding her image as little more than American photographer Edward Weston’s apprentice, model and lover.

And now a cache of Modotti’s photographs, to be unveiled in an exhibition opening Thursday at UC San Diego’s University Art Gallery, may help speed her way to stardom. The show features 78 images--many of them unpublished--culled from 100 photographs that had been in storage for 60 years. They were found in 1994 in the attic of an Oregon farmhouse.

Modotti’s photography career was very short, from 1923-1930, and only about 200 images by her were known to exist. The new material includes images of Weston and other associates, along with a wide range of Mexican street scenes and shots of political uprisings. Although some of the pictures are similar to published images, the discovery of such a large body of work is likely to be the source of great interest and controversy as Modotti authorities--who haven’t yet seen the work--weigh its significance.

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“Biographies of Modotti will have to be rewritten,” UCSD gallery director Kathleen Stoughton said.

Patricia Albers, a San Francisco-based writer and photography curator who unearthed the new material while researching a book on Modotti, is doing exactly that. Her biography is scheduled for publication in 1998 by Clarkson N. Potter.

Modotti was an Italian-born beauty who emigrated to the United States in 1913 and had a short career as a silent film actress in Hollywood before becoming a photographer and working with Weston in Mexico. She joined the Communist party there and was expelled from the country in 1930 as a “pernicious foreigner,” then engaged in revolutionary activities in Russia, Germany and Spain, returned to Mexico under a false passport in 1939 and died mysteriously in 1942 at the age of 45.

Indeed, she has such a thrilling life story, you have to wonder why it’s taken so long for Modotti to become a legend. But as tales of her love life and political activism have reached a wider audience, her stock in the art world has risen sharply. In 1991 her photograph “Roses, Mexico,” was sold for $165,000 at auction--a record price for photography at the time. During the past few years a spate of books and articles on her life and work have been published. A traveling exhibition, organized last year by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Now there’s new fuel for the Modotti fire, and it’s blazing in a rather unlikely setting, not known for its photography revelations. In conjunction with the exhibition and in celebration of the centennial of Modotti’s birth, the university will present an international conference, “Modotti 1896-1996,” Thursday night through Saturday afternoon.

Stoughton and Pasquale Verdicchio, a literary and cultural critic who teaches in the university’s literature department and has a special interest in the work of Italian immigrants, were already planning a joint exhibition and conference on Modotti when the new material came to light. Although Modotti had been much discussed in art circles, they thought it was time to view her work in a broader context of social, political and aesthetic issues. With the addition of the newly discovered photographs, what might have been a quiet, scholarly program has become a hot item.

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The existence of more Modotti photographs has long been rumored, but the discovery has caught insiders by surprise. “Modotti was known as a footnote to Weston, but I find footnotes interesting,” Albers said. She proceeded by exploring an even more obscure footnote.

“It occurred to me that one way to get more information about Modotti was to research the life of Robo Richey, who was said to have been her husband but was a mysterious figure,” Albers said. To find out more about Richey, whose full name was Roubaix de L’Abrie Richey, Albers went to Quebec, where his family had lived. She found that he had moved to Oregon, near Portland, so she began calling Richeys in the area and eventually reached someone who knew the whereabouts of the long-lost material.

Albers drove to Seattle, met her informants--whom she declined to identify--and drove with them to a farm in Oregon, where an elderly couple lives. “A hired man went up to the attic and hauled down an ancient, very heavy trunk and a wood box,” she said. “They were filled with letters, Richey family photographs, memorabilia and these photographs by Modotti.”

The trunk was with Robo Richey at his death in 1922. He had gone to Mexico but died of smallpox two days after Modotti joined him there. Modotti took the trunk to his mother, Rose Richey--fondly known as Vocio (the Italian word for mumbler)--who lived in Los Angeles. Modotti returned to Mexico with Weston, but she corresponded with Rose Richey until 1929, enclosing photographs in her letters.

At Richey’s death, in 1937, her daughter Marionne Richey moved back to Oregon and took the trunk with her. In subsequent years it has been passed to other family members, who wish to remain anonymous, Albers said. Although no plans have been made for the photographs, the owners intend to donate them to a public institution, she said.

Albers kept her discovery secret for a while, then decided some of the photographs should be exhibited. The letters and family photos were essential to her book, but the artwork was “a separate project to share with the world,” she said. She proposed a show at the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, but it never materialized. In the meantime, she heard about Stoughton’s plan for a Modotti exhibition and contacted her.

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Stoughton has installed two exhibitions, an introductory overview of Modotti’s life and art in “Tina Modotti: Selected Photographs” and the show of 78 recently discovered works in “Dear Vocio: Photography by Tina Modotti.” The latter consists of contact prints, mostly taken with a 3 1/4-by-4 1/4-inch Graflex camera. Shot in Mexico from 1924-29, they include images of Weston, his son Brett and Rose Richey, but the majority of pictures reveal Modotti’s fascination with the people and culture of Mexico as she become increasingly involved in socialist causes. She looked into children’s faces, photographed an Indian worker’s feet and shot a long line of impoverished people waiting to pawn their possessions.

* “Tina Modotti: Selected Photographs” and “Dear Vocio: Photographs by Tina Modotti,” University Art Gallery, UC San Diego, Thursday-Jan. 11. “Modotti 1896-1996,” Thursday, 7-10 p.m., Mandeville Auditorium and University Art Gallery; Friday, 9 a.m.-4 p.m. and Saturday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m., Institute of Americas. Free. Information: (619) 534-0419.

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