THE LOWE DOWN: Ask art historian and curator Sarah M. Lowe why painter Frida Kahlo and photographer Tina Modotti are so popular nowadays, and she'll turn your question around. You should more properly ask, she says, why they failed to garner notice in the past. "The reason they didn't get attention before is that people just ignored women artists," Lowe says in a telephone interview from her Brooklyn apartment. "All this interest came out of the women's movement in the 1970s and '80s." The phone call catches Lowe proofreading her dissertation on Modotti, a final step on her way to an art history doctorate from the City University of New York. But Lowe's hardly a neophyte scholar. She already has a handful of published books to her credit. Her new one on Modotti, Tina Modotti Photographs (Abrams, 1995), is, she writes in the introduction, the "first comprehensive study of her photographs," elegant black-and-white images that Modotti made in Mexico in the 1920s. The book includes portraits, still lifes and architectural studies, as well as politically inspired pictures of Mexican workers. Another new Abrams book, The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait, is a facsimile of the diary, with an introduction by Mexican author Carlos Fuentes and an essay and commentary by Lowe. In an earlier book, Frida Kahlo, Lowe analyzed the paintings. And last year she curated an exhibition of Modotti's work for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a show now traveling around the country that is believed to be the first comprehensive gathering of Modotti's photographs. Lowe will be in Tucson for a couple of days this month, to give two lectures at the UA, one each on Kahlo and Modotti. "I will introduce Kahlo's diaries and talk about the subjects she addressed. It will be an overview of her work (because) her life overshadows her work. I'll do an overview of Modotti's work, cover some of the interesting issues, and put it in the context of modernist photography." Like many other scholars who try to resurrect women's forgotten work, Lowe struggles to focus the attention on the art, rather than on the life. In the cases of Kahlo and Modotti, the effort is doubly difficult because their lives were the stuff of fiction: Both women were in relationships with famous male artists who sometimes used them as models, both embraced radical politics, both died relatively young under questionable circumstances. Kahlo, of course, was married to the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and was a member of Mexico's Communist Party during the turbulent '30s and '40s. Modotti, a generation older, was an Italian immigrant to San Francisco who acted on the stage and in Hollywood movies, learning photography later from her lover, the photographer Edward Weston. In the 1920s, Modotti and Weston moved to Mexico, where she too joined the party. She weathered some serious scandals in Mexico, including an unwarranted arrest for the murder of another lover, before being deported. Modotti spent the last years of her life working for the Soviet International Red Aid in various European countries, giving up photography in favor of her political commitments. Her body of work is actually quite small. "She lived a fantastic life," Lowe acknowledges. "People tend to romanticize it, but it was a really hard life. She was in incredible places at incredible times." Lowe's book does reveal some biographical information that was previously unknown--Modotti's husband, for instance, a man she married before she met Weston, had created a false biography for himself--but by and large Lowe is interested in how and why Modotti made her art. She puts the life in the context of the work. "I'm a realist and a materialist," Lowe says. "If it (a subject) doesn't have anything to do with her photography, I'll let other people cover it." Lowe will give a free lecture on Frida Kahlo at 7 p.m. Thursday, January 25, in the UA Architecture auditorium. She will speak on Tina Modotti at 3:30 p.m. Friday, January 26, at the Center for Creative Photography auditorium. The Center owns a number of Modotti photographs and an archive of letters that Modotti wrote to Weston. For more information call 621-7968. --Margaret Regan

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