5 - 13 December 2009

Fortezza da Basso - Florence

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of the President of the Italian Republic

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Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti

Life and art of Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti will be presented in a conferences by Gregorio Luke, Curator and Expert on Latinamerican art.

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo is a Mexican painter, born on July 6, 1907 and dead on July 13, 1954. Frida claimed to be born on 1910, the year of the outbreak of the Mexican revolution, because she wanted her life began together with the modern Mexico. This detail well introduces us to a singular personality, characterized since her childhood by a deep sense of independence and rebellion against social and moral ordinary habits, moved by passion and sensuality, proud of her "Mexicanidad" and cultural tradition set against the reigning Americanization: everything mixed with a peculiar sense of humour.

Her life was marked by physical suffering, started with the polio contracted at the age of five and worsen by her life-dominating event occurred in 1925. A bus accident caused severe injuries to her body owing to a pole that pierced her from the stomach to the pelvis. The medicine of her time tortured her body with surgical operations (32 throughout her life), corsets of different kinds and mechanical "stretching" systems.

Lots of her works were painted laying in the bed. Because of these physical conditions Frida was never able to have any children and this was a great sorrow for her. She had a great love, Diego Rivera (she married twice with this man and dedicated to him a passionate diary) but also a lot of lovers, men and women, such as Leon Trotsky and André Breton's wife.

Tina Modotti

Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti Mondini, nicknamed Assuntina, and later "Tina," was the daughter of an Italian machinist who immigrated to the United States in 1906. Modotti worked in a textile factory before joining her father in 1913 in San Francisco, where she worked as a seamstress and dressmaker. In 1917 she made her debut as an actress. She got married and moved to Hollywood the following year.

While working as an actress, Modotti met Edward Weston and began a romance with him around 1921. Her husband died in Mexico the next year, prompting her first visit to the country she would return to photograph in 1923, first as Weston's assistant and apprentice and later as his professional partner. She published her images, which included portrait studies, in the magazines Mexican Folkways and Formas . In 1927 Modotti joined the Communist Party, and her political affiliations and activities caused her to be deported from Mexico in 1930. Putting photography aside, she moved to Moscow, where she worked for International Red Aid, a relief organization. After having been allowed to return to Mexico in 1939, she died there of heart failure three years later.