A Couple of Views

In 1923, photographer Edward Weston and his lover, Tina Modotti, decided to start a new life together in Mexico. Weston, a restless 37-year-old family man, had recently given up his early soft-focus style for a crisper approach and was casting about for new directions in art and life.

Modotti had been studying photography with Weston while working as an ingenue in Hollywood. While taking time off in Mexico to grieve for her artist husband, who had died there the previous year, she had met artists active in the burgeoning Mexicanidad movement, which fostered the revival of themes and styles from indigenous cultures.

Although the couple’s idyll lasted only two years, it produced two distinctive bodies of work. They are at the Laguna Art Museum through Jan. 4 in an engrossing show circulated by George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y. and shown for the first time in Southern California.

The foreign setting offered Weston the freedom to hone his technique and his eye for the abstract beauty of objects. It was in Mexico that he made his famous 1925 photographs of a toilet bowl. (“Here was every sensuous curve of the ‘human form divine,’ but minus imperfection,” he wrote in his Daybook.)

Commissioned by writer Anita Brenner to photograph Mexican sights for her book, “Idols Behind Altars,” Weston turned a market scene into an essay on the design formed by a trio of canopies. His photographs transformed Brenner’s bare posterior into an exotic abstract object and a palm tree in Cuernavaca into a pale column rising up against a featureless sky.

The Mexicans Weston photographed were prominent. The open-mouthed woman with windblown hair whose face nearly fills the frame of “Guadaloupe, Mexico” is Guadaloupe Marin de Rivera, wife of artist Diego Rivera. Ironically, filmmakers and photographers of the ‘20s and ‘30s used the same camera angle for heroic images of workers.

But for Modotti, who had toiled in a textile factory in her native Udine, Italy, and a silk factory in San Francisco, Mexico was all about the daily lives of the laboring class. Her market scenes are teeming with people. Her photographs of individuals often show them half-hidden by their huge burdens of agricultural produce.

While Weston posed a sombrero, a serape and a rag doll to make a formal still life, Modotti--working for Mexican Folkways magazine--snapped vividly costumed pinatas hanging every which way in a market.

Working in a very small format (which Weston adopted in a memorable portrait of her) Modotti photographed men mending nets, a girl striding through the fields with a tipping basket on her head, a pensive young farm boy, groups of people in a stately courtyard in Tehuantepec. While some of these images are strikingly composed, others have the impromptu look of snapshots.

One subject the two artists had in common, despite their approaches, was the blissful gaze of love. Weston photographed Modotti reciting poetry, her luminous face transported by the invisible words issuing from her mouth. Modotti inscribed her photograph of a shadowy, early-morning landscape under a huge sky, “from the patio of the house where we spent the night.”

Weston went on to become a renowned photographer. Modotti joined the Communist Party in 1927, was expelled from Mexico for having been (falsely) implicated in a subsequent lover’s assassination and soon became too wrapped up in politics in Russia and Spain to continue as a photographer. Resettled in Mexico, she died in 1942.

Birk, Bengston: South of Border

The museum is also showing two other bodies of work with a South-of-the-border theme--a creative approach to exhibition planning that bodes well for the future.

About the only thing that can be said about the large, vacuous paintings Billy Al Bengston made in Mexico during the ‘70s is that it’s a wonder they once were so rapturously received.

More intriguingly problematic are recent paintings and drawings by fellow Angelino Sandow Birk, based on a visit to Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro.

Birk is known for paintings in which casually dressed contemporary figures pose in grandly stagy compositions originally devised by 19th century artists as cultural propaganda, to dramatize heroic behavior.

But he has seemed unaware of the implications of using compositions imbued with a rigidly moralizing point of view for latter-day social commentary. The works replace one stereotype with another, without confronting the complexities of contemporary life.

In the Rio pieces, Birk draws on a different tradition: paintings and prints based on travels to “exotic” locales whose fascination is based in equal parts on natural beauty and “primitive” human behavior.

Yet the lack of irony and self-awareness in this work puts Birk in the same camp as the 19th century Europeans. Birk seems not to have analyzed his own world view, which apparently veers between socially conscious moralist and amiable American on vacation (“hey, whatever”).

Birk’s “Cariocas” series attempts to dignify marginalized individuals such as “Girl From the Dona Marta Slums”--a sweating young woman who holds a broom--by painting them in a format once used for the landed gentry.

Theatrical sunsets illuminate landscape paintings with glimpses of glittering high-rises at the fringes of seedy reality (shacks with satellite dishes, a beer bottle on a bench).

The best of these--because it’s the least gimmicky--is “Storm Approaching Over Guanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro,” for which Birk borrows the style of 19th century Luminist landscape painter Martin Johnson Heade. A pipoca vendor observes a boat’s brilliant white sail against dead calm, inky-blue water in a painting that has no obvious agenda except wistful identification with someone enjoying a slice of Rio’s lushly temperamental natural life.

A set of tiny ex-voto-style paintings survey miscellaneous scenes that give a kaleidoscopic sense of life in a famously easygoing city with huge contrasts between rich and poor. But too many of these images are incomprehensible without their written descriptions, clustered inconveniently at one side of the wall.

In a show that badly needs editing, Birk’s best drawings get lost in the shuffle. Charting the meanings of local hand gestures (from “let’s go” to “check, please”) or identifying the occupations of local characters lounging on a street (drug dealer, rattan repairman), Birk uses the workmanlike approach of anthropological illustration to offer his most idiosyncratic view of Rio.

* “Modotti and Weston: Mexicanidad,” “Billy Al Bengston: San Felipe to Puerto Escondido” and “Sandow Birk, Carioca: A Year Among the Natives of Rio de Janeiro,” all through Jan. 4 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. $5, seniors and students $4, under 12 free. (714) 494-6531.