In exile far from home, a forgotten Indian rebel was photographed by the Italian artist Tina Modotti.
Article by Dr. Savitri Sawhney published in scroll.in
In exile far from home, a forgotten Indian rebel was photographed by the Italian artist Tina Modotti.
Article by Dr. Savitri Sawhney published in scroll.in
Many times it is not ties of blood that make a family: it is ideology, shared dreams, shared goals. This was to happen in the 1920s to three friends and comrades, companeros as it is said in Spanish, Tina Modotti, Diego Rivera and Pandurang Khankhoje coming from three different continents, but united in their lofty ideals to alleviate the ills of mankind.
The strange alchemy between the Italian photographer Tina Modotti, a woman before her time, a revolutionary and an artist par excellence and Pandurang Khankhoje, the Indian political exile and dedicated scientist is very difficult to define. Modotti had arrived in Mexico in the company of Edward Weston, the famous American photographer in 1923, and straight away plunged into the ebullient and vibrant artistic world of Mexico City. The Mexican tradition of muralist paintings and frescoes was revived by the vigourous work of painters like Diego Rivera. Modotti, an artist and photographer in her own right, posed for Diego Rivera in one of his major works for the murals of the School of Agriculture of Chapingo. She was painted as "Germination" (1925) and the "Oppressed Earth", depicting Modotti in all her sensual beauty; looking away, in a sense opposing her, were the political forces of the day. Not since the Renaissance had any country seen such an explosion of art; the past history of a nation and the faces of the new order, the decadence of society and the struggles of the poor, depicted with all the force and expression where only truth can prevail.
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