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拍品专文
The years immediately following the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) were a period of cultural and artistic awakening which engulfed the nation. Shedding the vestiges of European colonialism and its visual manifestations, Mexican artists began to embrace and celebrate the indigenous aesthetics and power of their homeland. Manuel Alvarez Bravo was among those artists.
A self-taught photographer, Bravo met Italian émigré and photographer Tina Modotti in 1927, and was subsequently introduced to the leading voices of the Mexican Renaissance, including the muralists Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. In 1930, Modotti—an avowed Socialist—was deported. Bravo bought her cameras and took over her role as a photographer for the magazine Mexican Folkways. It was during that period, in the early 1930s, when Bravo roamed the streets of Mexico with the mission of capturing quintessential Mexican scenes, conveying them often with Modernist or Surrealist undertones.
In the present lot, the figure of a woman emerges from a mass of laundry hung on clotheslines. The title indicates she is staring at a solar eclipse while stretching her rebozo to shield her eyes. With its emphasis on an indigenous, working-class woman and featuring a local garment at the front and center of the composition, the image has the hallmarks of the era. The presence of an eclipse—a simultaneous invocation of the sun and moon, two powerful emblems in Aztec mythology and Mexican folklore—further enhances the position of this work as an essential Post-Revolutionary Mexican composition.
The current lot is the only vintage, mounted print of this image to ever come to auction.
A self-taught photographer, Bravo met Italian émigré and photographer Tina Modotti in 1927, and was subsequently introduced to the leading voices of the Mexican Renaissance, including the muralists Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. In 1930, Modotti—an avowed Socialist—was deported. Bravo bought her cameras and took over her role as a photographer for the magazine Mexican Folkways. It was during that period, in the early 1930s, when Bravo roamed the streets of Mexico with the mission of capturing quintessential Mexican scenes, conveying them often with Modernist or Surrealist undertones.
In the present lot, the figure of a woman emerges from a mass of laundry hung on clotheslines. The title indicates she is staring at a solar eclipse while stretching her rebozo to shield her eyes. With its emphasis on an indigenous, working-class woman and featuring a local garment at the front and center of the composition, the image has the hallmarks of the era. The presence of an eclipse—a simultaneous invocation of the sun and moon, two powerful emblems in Aztec mythology and Mexican folklore—further enhances the position of this work as an essential Post-Revolutionary Mexican composition.
The current lot is the only vintage, mounted print of this image to ever come to auction.