FIGURE 15.1 Tina Modotti, Woman from Tehuantepec Carrying Yecapixtle.
Source: © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
Rachel Adams
The trans-American cohort that emerges out of Mexico City brings into view a different set of aesthetic and political commitments than those associated with the more familiar transatlantic modernist collectives. It prompts us to revise the more familiar story of modernism centered on Europe, in which “tradition” refers either to the cultures of outdated European ancestors or the aesthetics plundered from primitive regions of the world. Sharing an interest in formal innovation and the adoption of new or hybrid media, the Mexican modernists espoused a different relation to tradition as they aspired to produce an art that addressed the politics of revolution.
Modernism is often defined as the antithesis or repudiation of tradition. “No age can have been more rich than ours in writers determined to give expression to the differences which separate them from the past,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “and not to the resemblances which connect them with it.”1 James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus remarked famously of his desire to escape from tradition, “history . . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”2 Situating the futurists “on the last promontory of the centuries!” F. T. Marinetti declared war on the institutionalized guardians of tradition: “we will destroy museums, libraries, academies of every kind.” Theodor Adorno concurred when he remarked, “modernism negates tradition itself,” and T. S. Eliot’s influential “Tradition and the Individual Talent” sought to preserve the besieged concept via its dynamic engagement with history.3 These views are reiterated by critics, for example, the retrospective survey of Astradur Eysteinsson, who writes decisively, “‘Modernism’ signals a dialectical opposition to what is not functionally ‘modern,’ namely ‘tradition,’” and “the self-conscious break with tradition must, I think, be seen as a hallmark of modernism.”4 Spanning more than half a century, writing from varied political and aesthetic investments, these diverse authors all conceive of modernism as a decisive break with tradition. But despite their differences, they share a vision of modernism that operates within a strikingly circumscribed geographical frame, one centered on major European cities such as London, Paris, and Berlin and radiating outward to the eastern United States.
In what follows, I will argue that the regionally specific nature of these authors’ claims informs their account of modernism’s relation to tradition in ways that have not yet been fully recognized. I ask what would happen to their understanding of tradition if we were to reorient familiar modernist geographies, centering them around different locales or tracing out more scattered and decentralized circuits of cultural exchange. I focus on the particular trans-American cohort that emerged out of Mexico City, where—for a brief period—authors, artists, critics, and policy makers sought to revitalize Mexico’s ancient indigenous traditions in the service of a modern project of social, cultural, and political reform. Taking Mexico and the Mexicanist element in international modernism as an example, I hope that this essay can serve as a model that can be exported to the analysis of modernisms emerging from other understudied regions of the world. Doubtless each will have its own histories and agendas, but together these more geographically specific accounts will further destabilize the centrality of Europe within narratives of global modernism while providing alternative understandings of the meaning and function of tradition within modernism’s aesthetic and political projects.
Like their better-known counterparts, Mexican modernists emerged from the devastating experience of war determined to repudiate European tradition. But where Europeans saw their traditions shattered and dispersed (Eliot’s “fragments shored against our ruins”), Mexicans emerged from their ten-year civil war committed to reclaiming traditions that had been suppressed by a leadership in thrall to foreign influences. Postrevolutionary Mexicans rejected the Europhilia of the Porfirio Diaz regime, instead embracing their own history and culture with a nationalist fervor akin to that of the postcolonial societies of the later twentieth century. Where European modernists plundered the exotic cultures of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific Islands, Mexican modernists sought to recover indigenous traditions they saw as their own authentic heritage. Yet the strongly nationalist bent of the Mexican modernists did not make them provincial. Many of the artists and intellectuals involved with Mexican modernism were seasoned cosmopolitans who traveled abroad and engaged with cultural developments in other parts of the world. At the same time, Mexico was becoming a magnet for an international cohort of leftist scholars, authors, and artists attracted to the social and political projects of the postrevolutionary state, which saw culture as integral to social reform. These circuits of travel and exchange turned Mexico City into a trans-American bohemia that rivaled its counterparts in Greenwich Village, Paris, and London.
Despite the comparison to Europe and the United States, the Mexican bohemia was marked by significant disparities that shaped its participants’ attitudes toward the traditions they incorporated into their creative expression. Although Mexico City was a cosmopolitan metropolis, much of the country remained untouched by industrialization and ravaged by the effects of civil war. If modernist expression arises in response to the conditions of modernity, these were different in Europe or the United States than they were in Mexico, which had only partially entered the industrial age. In the Mexican context, the distance between tradition and modernity, “primitive” and contemporary, felt greater but also more proximate. As Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey argue, compared to European modernism, “‘ancient’ history was chronologically much closer and also in many ways culturally closer” in Mexico. Because “in the Mexican revolution, appeals to the pre-Conquest Indian past still had a political value . . . it was possible for political and artistic avant-gardes to overlap in Mexico in a way that they never could in Europe.”5 The view of tradition endorsed by this Mexican-inspired modernism was shaped by its emergence out of a largely agricultural national setting, one with a significant indigenous population that still spoke the languages and maintained the cultures of its ancient precursors. The revolution had mobilized these people with its promise of land redistribution, workers’ rights, and vision of a more democratic Mexican state. Thus, while many Euro-American modernists embraced the dictum of an apolitical “art for art’s sake,” Mexicans saw art as closely tied to revolutionary goals for social and political reform.
When Mexico enters the conversation about international modernism, it is typically through the towering figures of the muralists José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siquieros, and Diego Rivera, whose international training and reputations brought them into the circles of their Anglo-American and European counterparts. But the modernist community in Mexico was far broader and more heterogeneous, and the aesthetics of Mexican modernism more diverse, than is implied by this trinity. Women played an integral role in creating and sustaining the Mexican renaissance, a term coined by the Mexican anthropologist Anita Brenner. Many were important artists in their own right; others curated exhibits, arranged contacts, published articles, organized salons, and provided other occasions for informal gathering. Of these women, Katherine Anne Porter, Anita Brenner, and Tina Modotti are a particularly interesting trio. All three traveled to Mexico, where they found inspiration in the modernist embrace of Mexico’s shifting social and political landscape. By charting their journeys to and from Mexico, we can track the spread of a Mexican element in international modernism. Their modernist work is both local, in that it could not have emerged anywhere but postrevolutionary Mexico, and global, in that it was attuned to events and cultural developments abroad.
Three Lives
Katherine Anne Porter
While most American participants in the high-modernist culture of the 1920s recognized travel to Europe as a crucial rite of passage, Katherine Anne Porter went to some lengths to distance herself from those circles. Although as a young woman she had wished to visit Europe, she did not make it there until 1931, when she sailed by an unconventional route that departed from the Mexican port of Veracruz. In Europe, she moved among the literary giants of her time and came away unimpressed, writing in her Notebooks:
One evening a crowd gathered in Sylvia’s bookshop to hear T. S. Eliot read some of his own poems. Joyce sat near Eliot, his eyes concealed under his dark glasses, silent, motionless, head bowed a little, eyes closed most of the time, as I could see plainly from my chair a few feet away in the same row, as far removed from human reach as if he were already dead. Eliot, in a dry but strong voice, read some of his early poems, turning the pages now and again with a look very near to distaste, as if he did not like the sound of what he was reading.6
Porter’s tableau captures the end of an era. Decades later, she would express gratitude for having avoided the movement at its apogee. Her years in Mexico meant that she “missed more than half of the ’twenties in Greenwich Village; I missed the Hemingway epoch in Paris; and I think these are two of the luckiest misses I ever made.”7 Proudly asserting her artistic autonomy, Porter turns to Mexico as an alternative site of expatriate community.
While these memories are colored by the compensatory embellishments that often characterized Porter’s self-representation, they nonetheless represent an effort to posit a different relationship to tradition than many members of her generation. Living in Mexico on and off between 1920 and 1931 left an indelible mark on her writing, her understandings of art and politics, and the subsequent course of her life. Porter’s work as a reporter, reviewer, translator, and curator helped inform American and European audiences about the activities of the Mexican modernists. Her own writing was also deeply influenced by contact with Mexican indigenous traditions. Porter’s indigenism landed her in a contradictory position. On the one hand, she recognized that the Mexican renaissance was responsible for introducing Mexico’s traditions to the world; on the other, she believed that such attention exerted a corrosive effect on the pristine folk she so admired. She found the equanimity missing from her own life only in ancient precontact societies, and she came to believe that the revolution, which claimed to represent the Mexican people, had caused them more harm than good. She concluded that it endangered indigenous traditions and people by exposing them to the corrosive influence of modernity.
Porter’s bleak and contradictory views are most apparent in her first short story set in Mexico. “María Concepción” (1922) illustrates the corrosive impact of the revolution and the impossibility of preserving native tradition from the encroachments of modernity. Porter begins by romanticizing her protagonist, María Concepción, whom she describes as “walk[ing] with the free, natural, guarded ease of the primitive woman carrying an unborn child.”8 But María’s life is neither natural nor primitive. Her village is policed by local revolutionaries, and most of its population is employed by an American archeologist who promises “to uncover the lost city of their ancestors.” Porter casts a skeptical eye on his project by adopting the perspective of the villagers, who see little value in the broken and dirty artifacts they are exhuming.
The story’s political message rests on the contrast between the protagonist and her nemesis, María Rosa, who runs away with María Concepción’s husband, Juan, and joins the revolutionary forces. María Rosa is brave and tenacious. She defies tradition by leaving home and bearing Juan’s child out of wedlock. María Concepción is more closely tied to various forms of tradition. At a time when the church was associated with the antirevolutionary values of the Porfiriato, she is deeply religious and proud to have been married by a priest. The silent and long-suffering María Concepción remains rooted in place while Juan and María Rosa travel the countryside. When Juan deserts the army and returns home, he beats María Concepción and orders her to cook for him, which she does without complaining. As if to embody her own deadly stasis, María Concepción’s child is stillborn.
Critics have tended to treat María Concepción’s revenge as a feminist victory, if an ambivalent one. Ostracized from her community and enraged at Juan’s betrayal, she brutally murders María Rosa. When the corrupt local police attempt to charge her with the murder, Juan and the other villagers come to her defense, justifying María Rosa’s death as punishment for her immorality. The exonerated María Concepción assumes responsibility for María Rosa’s newborn son and returns home with Juan. At the story’s end, Juan contemplates his future with despair, knowing that with the death of María Rosa, his hope for change is extinguished. By contrast, María Concepción is satisfied by this return to the status quo, even though it means living with a faithless, abusive husband.
If there is a victory at the end of this story, it goes to the woman who embodies antirevolutionary values over the woman who fights for a different world. “María Concepción” thus condenses many of Porter’s most pessimistic reactions to the revolution. Drawn to the promise that unionization and land redistribution were the first steps toward the creation of a more just society, she came to believe that the campesinos were incapable of fighting for their own rights. She idealized precontact rural folk and the traditions they embodied but wrote them into an impossible position whereby they were corrupted as soon as they encountered the forces of cultural or political modernization.
The combination of idealization and despair that characterized Porter’s responses to indigenous tradition sounds much like modernist primitivism. To what extent, then, does it matter that her writing is set in Mexico? The difference is that Porter’s primitivism grows directly from her exposure to the Mexican indigenists, who saw the turn to traditional folk aesthetics as a political gesture in keeping with the populist goals of the revolution. While she shares their blind spots, she also participates in a political project that involves not simply celebration of the primitive but a more general elevation of indigenous folkways, a project that was closely tied to Mexican agendas for social reform. Thus, via Porter’s work we see how the recovery of tradition may be a political as well as an aesthetic project. “María Concepción” is about the ways the Mexican Revolution has failed the populations it claimed to represent, but it is also an instance of a modernism whose political and aesthetic project grew from an engagement with and a reworking of particular American traditions.
When Porter—the native Texan who went to Mexico—wrote an enthusiastic review of Anita Brenner’s Idols Behind Altars (1929),9 she created a concrete link to an author who—at age eleven—had completed a reverse migration when her family fled war-torn Mexico for Texas. Like Porter, the adult Brenner was drawn to the political and cultural promises of postrevolutionary Mexico, and she would eventually make it her permanent home. Through their work as writers, curators, and advocates, both women opened lines of contact between Mexico and the United States as well as between North America and more distant parts of the world. Brenner accepted this role more optimistically than Porter, fashioning herself as a cultural ambassador who championed Mexican artists and Mexican political causes abroad throughout her adult life. Whereas Porter sought purity in indigenous people and arts, Brenner affirmed mestizaje as Mexico’s richest cultural tradition. Without denying the brutality of Spanish conquest, she found strength in the fusion of European and indigenous elements within the modern Mexican populace. And whereas Porter saw the corruption of the Mexican state as a reason to repudiate the revolution, Brenner sought to recuperate its legacy as a way of managing strained relations between the United States and Mexico.
Written for a foreign audience, Idols Behind Altars surveys Mexican art from precontact indigenous civilizations to the present. Its title, an allusion to the persistence of pantheistic beliefs despite the imposition of Christianity, is a metaphor for Brenner’s understanding of the Mexican people, whose mestizo vitality comes from the mingled cultures of colonizer and colonized. Idols Behind Altars puts Mexico at the center of the history of American art. Brenner argued that, in contrast to a moribund Europe, Mexico was witnessing a creative resurgence akin to the artistic awakening that had taken place across the Atlantic five centuries earlier. As Mexican artists returned home from Europe to recover their native American traditions, they were shifting the history of art itself from established centers in Paris, Italy, and Spain to Mexico and the Americas.
Whereas Porter sought out the uncorrupted culture of the Mexican Indian, Brenner saw no possibility for such an escape from modernity. She recognized indigenism as a distinctively modern formation that entailed a recovery of “folk” traditions in response to contemporary aesthetic and political needs. Rather than fleeing from modernity, Mexican artists had been prompted by their encounters with modernism to reconsider the themes and traditions of their own American culture. As they translated modernism into a New World context, they envisioned their art working in the service of revolutionary politics. In Brenner’s view, the Mexican artists were, at least in theory, at one with the people, rather than being elevated above them like their European counterparts. The Mexican renaissance thus introduced an alternative modernism, one that was politically engaged and attuned to the needs and values of a mass public. Its antecedents were to be found not only in ancient indigenous art but also in the traditional forms of the corrido and pulqueria murals, which had long been a means of self-expression for ordinary Mexicans. In the spirit of these popular forms, the new artists aspired to work collectively and anonymously and to use widely accessible visual media that did not require literacy for their meanings to be understood.
While the artist might express solidarity with the people, Brenner acknowledged that few Mexican artists could claim actual Indian ancestry. But where Porter saw this racial impurity as a sign of hypocrisy, Brenner believed biological kinship was less important than the fact that “nowhere as in Mexico has art so intimately been linked to the fate of its people.”10 Indeed, Brenner’s position is consistent with Mexican understandings of race, which have more to do with class position than blood. Eschewing the European modernists’ commitment to an autonomous and elevated art, the Mexican artists understood themselves as workers, and they aspired to represent the interests of working-class and rural audiences. Brenner took them at their word, emphasizing their dedication to indigenous traditions over their privileged backgrounds.
Idols ends somewhat surprisingly by turning from the attractions of Mexican art to Mexico’s strategic position in the hemisphere. Throughout the book, Brenner describes the Mexican renaissance as not merely an explosion of artistic creativity but also the outgrowth of violent social and political upheaval that had enduring consequences for the entire region. Unlike Porter, who swung from extremes of enthusiasm to condemnation depending on her mood, Brenner consistently worked to strengthen cultural ties between Mexico and the United States in the hope that they would lead to improved political relations as well as a recognition of Mexico’s centrality to the history of American art. Tradition was essential to her account of the Mexican renaissance. Its modernity constituted a break with a more recent past in which Mexican artists had been slavishly bound to their European counterparts. Rejecting those influences, the Mexican modernists were inventing new forms inspired by the recovery of native traditions that could become the source for an authentically American art.
Tina Modotti
Brenner and Porter both recognized the power of visual images to communicate the excitement of Mexico’s cultural renaissance to foreign audiences. No matter how vivid their prose, these authors could not adequately describe the work of Mexican artists in words alone, and the murals, their most celebrated accomplishments, could not travel at all. It was through photography that the muralists’ work became known in the United States, enabling them to receive lucrative commissions and international acclaim. Projects that incorporated written and photographic matter brought Brenner and Porter into contact with Tina Modotti, the Italian-born photographer whose artistic career was concentrated almost exclusively in Mexico. Modotti moved there in 1923 to establish a photographic studio with her lover, Edward Weston. Her beauty and vibrant personality made her the center of social gatherings and the inspiration for many in Mexico’s artistic community. The increasing radicalism of Modotti’s beliefs reverses the political journey of Porter and, to a lesser extent, Brenner. Whereas Porter’s leftist commitments first drew her to Mexico, Modotti moved there because of her romantic and professional partnership with the apolitical Weston. Her growing politicization caused them to grow apart as she increasingly dedicated her art to politics, joining the Communist Party in 1927. In a letter to Brenner, she wrote that she aspired to photograph with “a class eye”: “I look upon people now not in terms of race [or] types but in terms of classes.”11 Her subsequent photography fused the iconography of socialism and the formal concerns of Euro-American modernism, situating these international movements in a Mexican setting. Her career as a photographer ended in 1930 when she was accused of plotting the murder of President Ortiz Rubio and deported from Mexico.
Modotti can be identified as an American modernist because her formal experimentation and political commitments are grounded in New World settings. Her Americanist themes are evident even in still-life photographs that portray objects native to a New World landscape: the flor de manita reaching up like a gnarled, grasping hand; the asymmetrical, stunted geranium struggling to grow from a cracked pot; nopal cactus; stalks of sugar cane; corn; and the calla lily, which became a signature of Diego Rivera. The deepening of Modotti’s political commitments is evident in a series that combines the international socialist icons of hammer and sickle with the specifically Mexican symbols of petate, bandolier, guitar, and sombrero. Here, a modernist precision and simplicity of form is applied to manifestly political content that is at once local and international.
Modotti also shared the indigenists’ interest in native people and cultures. Her photographs of popular arts and crafts illustrate Brenner’s Idols Behind Altars. While some of these images picture objects in isolation—closer to the European modernists’ appropriation of traditional artifacts—others show them in use, evidence of Modotti’s concern with a living tradition situated within a larger social setting. Her photographs of Mexican Indians complement the themes of the muralists’ paintings while placing particular emphasis on the activities of indigenous women. In Modotti’s photographs, women engage in daily tasks of shopping, washing, and caring for children. They appear calm, untroubled, and directly connected to the products of their work, seeming to live out the socialist ideal of unalienated labor. Indeed, in some of these photographs, implements such as bowls, baskets, and jars appear as extensions of the human subject, their rounded surfaces echoing the contours of the female body.
FIGURE 15.1 Tina Modotti, Woman from Tehuantepec Carrying Yecapixtle.
Source: © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
As her political commitments deepened, Modotti documented the radicalization of the Mexican people in the years following the revolution. Her photographs of workers meeting, parading, and reading communist publications suggest their awakening connection to socialist struggles around the world. Modotti’s iconic postrevolutionary subject is a politically conscious mestiza. One of her most famous photographs (figure 15.2) depicts a woman carrying an enormous red flag of communist solidarity. Her dark hair and skin bespeak indigenous ancestry; her actions identify her as a political comrade.
Modotti’s photographs of campesinos reading the communist paper El Machete testify to the power of literacy to instill national and transnational political consciousness. The papers’ headlines, which are clearly legible, address a combination of Mexican concerns (land redistribution) and international socialist causes (the war against Russia). Alluding to the device of modernist photomontage, these images derive their meaning from a combination of print and visual forms. Modotti would conduct a number of experiments that incorporated writing into her photographs. These include the bluntly political Elegance and Poverty (figure 15.3), where a man dressed in ragged clothing appears to sit beneath a billboard advertising an elegant clothier, although the two scenes actually come from different photographs artfully fused together. Here Modotti, like Porter, shows the failures of the postrevolutionary state to improve the lives of the people it claimed to champion. This image suggests that, for Modotti, photography was not simply illustration for written texts, as in the work of Porter and, in some cases, Brenner. The relationship could also be reversed so that words become a supplement to the photographic image. Words appear in Modotti’s photographs in the form of slogans and headlines, which lack complexity but are capable of immediate and dramatic communication. Her work with photomontage responds to the problem of widespread illiteracy, which compelled socially conscious Mexican artists to seek forms that could best reach untutored audiences. More than Porter or Brenner, Modotti aspired not only to represent the Mexican people but also to find ways to address them directly. In this sense, she would not simply mine Mexican indigenous and popular traditions—as was the case with so many forms of modernist primitivism—but rather engage with those for whom such traditions were still very much alive.
FIGURE 15.2 Tina Modotti, Woman with Flag.
Source: © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
FIGURE 15.3 Tina Modotti, Elegance and Poverty.
Source: © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
Modotti’s departure from Mexico is a fitting place to end this reflection on modernism and tradition because it coincided with a waning of the Mexican renaissance, brought about by the growing conservatism of the government under President Portes Gil, the abandonment or dilution of revolutionary commitments, and the departure of many of Mexico’s leading artists and intellectuals. Under these circumstances, the modernist embrace of indigenous forms begins to look like little more than an aesthetic exercise, shorn of its commitments to political representation and social justice. But as Michael Denning argues in The Cultural Front, political defeat is not an effective gauge for the cultural consequences of a revolution.12 Like the U.S. Popular Front that is Denning’s subject, the Mexican Revolution, whatever its many political failures, left an indelible imprint on North American modernist culture. For a brief period it gave rise to a Mexican bohemia where artistic creativity flourished, inspired by proximity to what were perceived as authentically American traditions and hopes for a new, more egalitarian social order that might incorporate the bearers of those traditions. The benefits of this heady moment were particularly significant for women. Due in large part to their efforts, it would subsequently be much more difficult for foreigners to view Mexico as left behind by modernity or its culture as slavishly indebted to European tradition. And Mexican culture, with its distinctive fusion of modern and traditional indigenous elements, would continue to exert a formative, if often unacknowledged, influence on the arts across North America.
Bringing the work of Porter, Brenner, and Modotti together and putting it in the context of a Euro-American artistic scene draws attention to the importance of Mexico on the map of international modernism. Not only does this altered perspective feature new personalities, but it brings into view a different set of aesthetic and political commitments than those associated with the more familiar transatlantic modernist cohorts. It prompts us to revise the more familiar story of modernism centered on Europe, in which “tradition” refers either to the cultures of outdated European ancestors or the aesthetics plundered from primitive regions of the world. Sharing an interest in formal innovation and the adoption of new or hybrid media, the Mexican modernists espoused a different relation to tradition as they aspired to produce an art that addressed the politics of revolution. This meant drawing from the rich legacy of Mexico’s indigenous past but also seeking forms that could speak to audiences for whom that tradition was still very much alive. An awareness of their aspirations as well as their failures should be part of a more contextual and geographically specific understanding of tradition within global modernism.
1. Virginia Woolf, “How It Strikes a Contemporary,” The Times Literary Supplement (April 5, 1923), http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CLASS/workshop97/gribbin/contemporary.html.
2. James Joyce, Ulysses, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm.
3. F. T. Marinetti, “The Manifesto of Futurism,” in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), 51. Theodor Adorno, “Philosophy of History and the New,” in Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge, 1984), 31; T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood, http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html.
4. Astradu Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 8, 52.
5. Laura Mulvey, with Peter Wollen, “Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 95, 96.
6. Cited in William L. Nance, “Katherine Anne Porter and Mexico,” Southwest Review 15, no. 2 (Spring 1970): 145–146.
7. Roy Newquist, interview with Katherine Anne Porter, McCall’s (August 1965): 142.
8. Katherine Anne Porter, “María Concepción,” in The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (New York: Delacorte, 1970), 3.
9. Katherine Anne Porter, “Old Gods and New Messiahs” (review of Idols Behind Altars by Anita Brenner), in “This Strange Old World” and Other Book Reviews by Katherine Anne Porter, ed. Darlene Harbour Unrue (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 83, 88.
10. Anita Brenner, Idols Behind Altars (New York: Payson and Clark, 1929), 244.
11. Cited in Sarah M. Lowe, Tina Modotti: Photographs (New York: Abrams, 1995), 36.
12. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996).
