The Tetrad Tina Modotti, Vittorio Vidali, Diego Rivera and Julio Antonio Mella before his death.

Tina Modotti went to Mexico together with Edward Weston and his son in 1923. She agreed to run Weston’s photographic studio, free of charge, at the tender age of 26, which is the age in which we start questioning our reason of being in the universe and forget about having some fun. It may have not come as a slow realization to Tina, born in a proletarian family, to experience traces of servility and exploitation in her work relationship to Weston. Her feminist nature rebelled and she soon found out her natural soul mates in the members of the Mexican Communist party, among them the muralist painter Diego Rivera.

It is not difficult to visualize Diego Rivera in an affair with Tina Modotti. After all, he was as wonderful a womanizer as Picasso was. In his Mural “The Arsenal”, Tina Modotti is shown at the right of the canvas holding an ammunition belt. Modotti was a very active figure in the struggles of international communism and she is staring at no other than the founder of the International Communist Party of Cuba, Julio Antonio Mella. Behind Modotti the face of Vittorio Vidali snakes in, his eyes full of hate and ire, projecting forward his evil eyebrows; his head covered by a dark hat that signal darkness of thoughts and sentiments, the semblance of the notorious assassin suspected of having murdered many deviant communists. In the purges against Trostkyists --and Julio Antonio Mella was one of those deviant Trostkyits – orthodox Vidali may have played an active role.

What this painting by Diego Rivera conveys is not only the proletariat getting ready for battle; it also portrays the most base instincts of human nature. For the Communists, who had as their ideological tenet the belief in a selfless human being, this realistic portray of human nature is what may have ultimately triggered Rivera’s dismissal from the Communist party. 

It is likely that Comandante Marcos, Vidali, felt jealous of the relationship between Tina and Mella. After all, Rivera’s painting shows him hurt by her preference for Mella, envious and offended in his twisted macho-man code of honor; which seems to be the strongest motive behind Vidali’s possible assassination of Julio. His hate of a wonderful, intelligent, capable and good-looking Cuban competitor may have pulled the culprit’s trigger. He may have killed Julio and used political treason as an excuse, when the real motivation was a beastly sentiment of hate, jealousy and possession.

Rivera may have been jealous, and envious too, of the relationship between Tina and Mella. Rivera’s wife of that time, Lupe Marin has testified somewhere that the breaking up of her marriage to Rivera was due to Diego’s affair with Tina, which lasted for about a year and gave birth to five murals and numerous drawings. He may not have been the hand behind the trigger that killed Mella but he could have known of the event without doing anything to avoid it. In the competition among Vidali, Rivera and Mella, low sentiments of possession and desire for the heart of Tina could have played  no small role in Julio Antonio Mella assassination.

There is a detail in The Arsenal that calls my attention; Diego Rivera has placed Modotti’s hands in such a way that instead of holding a lifeless ammunition belt resembles caressing Julio Antonio Mella’s penis. About that time Tina mentions that "recently Diego has taken to painting details with an exaggerated precision. He leaves nothing to the imagination”. Perhaps Rivera is metaphorically alluding to the projectile qualities of Julio Antonio Mella’s virility, his gun powder explosiveness and extraordinary capacity for producing children of the Revolution, such as the one placed in front of Tina, who seems to be holding her umbilical cordon, maybe the result of Mella and Tina relationship.

This painting has been rendered as proof of Diego Rivera’s involvement in the death of Julio Antonio Mella because it shows Diego’s awareness of the events. The connection of Rivera with the murder, supposedly revealed by the scene, and which cost him the separation from the Communist party, seems to be just a fabrication, a smoke curtain to hide the real motives behind this painting’s rendition of proletarians and revolutionaries as ordinary human beings. This negation of reality has ultimately cost them their credibility and reality test common sense.

Please enjoy the beautiful, courageous, wonderful and rebellious Tina Modotti in The Tiger's Coat.