TINA MODOTTI (1896-1942) Rene D'Harnoncourt Marionette with Gourd Bird. 1929. Silver print, the image measuring 9⅜x7⅛ inches (23.8x18.1 cm.).
Rare print of a photograph made by Modotti in 1929 of a marionette of Austrian-born Count Rene D'Harnoncourt. D'Harnoncourt arrived in Mexico in 1926 and found work in the gallery of Frederick W. Davis, a prominent dealer of folk art and antiquities in the Mexican capital. He left Mexico in 1933 and later served as director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City from 1949-1967. Chicago-based artist and puppeteer Luis Bunin created the D'Harnoncourt marionette on a visit to Mexico in 1929 and it featured in a puppet-theatre production at the U.S. embassy that year. Modotti took more than 20 photographs of Bunin's various marionettes and theatre productions, including two of the D'Harnoncourt puppet. The D'Harnoncourt puppet in this photo is looking down and reaching toward a painted gourd stork figure, his prominent nose nearly touching the stork's long beak. Modotti used the same stork figure in other photographs, including "Girl with Stork, Mexico City, c. 1926." Modotti's other D'Harnoncourt puppet photo shows the marionette bowing obsequiously, offering miniature ex-voto paintings and other art, in mimicry of his time at the Fred Davis gallery.
Provenance Sotheby's in 1999; to the Present Owner
Publication Tomaszewska, Lara, Marionettes and Metaphor: Political Satire in the Photographs of Tina Modotti, M.A. Thesis, Dept. of Art History, Concordia University, Montreal, 1988, pp. vi, 74, 101
