Tina Modotti 1896-1942

Sotheby's New York, 9 October 1991, Sale 6216, Lot 218

Manfred Heiting Collection, Amsterdam

Private collection, California

Acquired by the present owners from the above, 2000

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Tina Modotti: Photographs, September - November 1995; and thereafter to:

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, December 1995 - February 1996

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, March - June 1996 

Sarah M. Lowe, Tina Modotti: Photographs (Philadelphia Musem of Art, 1995), pl. 72 (this print)

Other prints of this image:

Mexican Folkways, Vol. 3, No, 4 (August-September 1927), p. 189

International Literature, Vol. 2 (1936), p. 2

transition, No. 18 (November 1929), opposite p. 278

Der Arbeiter-Fotograf, IV H7 (1930), p. 157

Margaret Hooks, Tina Modotti, Photographer and Revolutionary (London and San Francisco, 1993) , p. 142

Tina Modotti: The Mexican Renaissance (Paris, 2000), p. 98

Tina Modotti moved to Mexico City in 1923 with her lover and photographic mentor Edward Weston.  From the time of their arrival, the two became involved in the city’s overlapping artistic and political circles.  Modotti’s embrace of Mexican culture was far more intense than that of Weston, and her sensitivity to the plight of the Mexican people and involvement in radical politics are evident in much of her work.  Modotti composed Bandolier, Corn, Sickle as part of a series of still life studies of objects symbolizing both Mexican culture and the Mexican revolution (see Lowe, pls. 68-72).  Bandolier, Corn, Sickle was first reproduced in the August-September 1927 issue of the journal Mexican Folkways, where it was accompanied by the lyrics of a corrido -- a long-form ballad used to convey news, information, and current events – entitled El 30-30.   

It is believed that the photograph offered here is one of only four prints of this image extant.  Two prints, one carte-postale-sized, are in a private collection in Mexico; another is in the collection of the Fundacion Cultural Televisa, Mexico City.