Tina Modotti, 1896-1942, was a remarkable woman and an outstanding photographer whose legendary beauty and relationships with famous men have until now eclipsed a life integrally linked to the most important artistic, political and historical developments of our century. A woman of enormous courage, both in life-threatening situations and her challenging of women's traditional roles, Tina Modotti's life became the stuff of myth and legend. Based on years of painstaking research in Mexico, Europe and the United States, Tina Modotti - Photographer and Revolutionary includes a wealth of new material and is a major step toward demythologizing the life of one of the most fascinating women of an extraordinary era. In 1913 Tina Modotti left her native Italy for San Francisco, becoming a star of the local Italian theatre before marrying the romantic poet-painter Roubaix de l'Abrie Richey. By 1920, she had embarked on a Hollywood film career and immersed herself in bohemian Los Angeles, beginning an intense relationship with the respected American photographer, Edward Weston. On a trip to Mexico in 1922 to bury her husband, she met the Mexican muralists and became enthralled with the burgeoning cultural renaissance there. Increasingly dissatisfied with the film world, she persuaded Weston to teach her photography and move with her to Mexico. Her Mexico City homes became renowned gathering places for artists, writers and radicals, where Diego Rivera courted Frida Kahlo and Latin American exiles plotted revolution. Turning her camera to record Mexico in its most vibrant years, her photographs achieve a striking synthesis of artistic form and social content. Her contact with Mexico's muralists, including a brief affair with Rivera, led to her involvement in radical politics. In 1929, she was framed for the murder of her Cuban lover, gunned down at her side on a Mexico City street. A scapegoat of government repression, she was publicly slandered in a sensational trial before being acquitted. Expelled from Mexico in 1930, she went to Berlin and then to the Soviet Union, where she abandoned photography for a political activism that brought her into contact with Sergei Eisenstein, Alexandra Kollontai, La Pasionaria, Ernest Hemingway and Robert Capa. She carried out dangerous Comintern missions in fascist Europe, became an apparatchik in the early years of Stalinism, and played a key role in the Spanish Civil War. Returning to Mexico incognito in 1939, she died three years later, a lonely - and controversial - death. This detailed study of the Italian-born photographer and political activist seeks to gather recognition for Modotti (1896-1942), who has been overshadowed by her lovers Edward Weston and Diego Rivera. Having acted in Hollywood silent films and theater, she accompanied Weston to Mexico, serving as his apprentice, model, and lover. Her images of Mexico's workers, its poverty and political unrest, and her abstract depictions of flowers and interior architecture have recently been sold at record-setting prices. In 1924, she joined the Mexican Communist party, supporting antifascist ideals. When a revolutionary leader with whom she was passionately involved was assassinated, Modotti devoted the remainder of her life to communism. Despite a bothersome journalistic style, Hooks ( Guatemalan Women Speak , EPICA, 1991) conveys the dramatic life of an extraordinary woman. Recommended for large collections. - Joan Levin, MLS, Chicago Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Modotti (1896-1942) is known primarily as the prot{‚}eg{‚}ee and lover of Edward Weston, who persuaded him to go to Mexico in 1923, a move that clarified and advanced his artistic vision. In Hooks' biography, Modotti appears as the complex woman she was--earnest, beautiful, creative, naive, determined, emotional, tireless, vulnerable. That some of these characteristics conflicted is the key, perhaps, to her political victimization as the lover of Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella, murdered in 1929, and then as a hard-line Stalinist and companion to her final lover, Italian Communist Vittorio Vidali. An immigrant to San Francisco, Modotti began as an actress and model, which led her to Weston and then her own photography. At its fullest development during her Mexican years, her work blended Weston's sensuality, her own exquisite sense of design, and, more importantly, a genuinely political content in compelling images that supported a revolutionary socialist message. Although never a political theorist or leader, Modotti was persecuted and deported. Her life became sad and rootless, increasingly involved in ever riskier organizing and couriership for the Communists and ending in a lonely death in a Mexico City taxi. Hooks makes this tragic life gripping, and the book is well-illustrated with Modotti's and others' photographs. Gretchen Garner Hooks (a Mexico-based journalist) offers a well-researched, deeply sympathetic, and superbly illus