Yale University Press has acquired Mark Eisner’s Art as a Weapon: Tina Modotti and Her Years at the Heart of the Mexican Cultural Renaissance, the biography of a fascinating and influential photographer who in the 1920s collaborated with such artists and activists as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Siqueiros to merge art and politics amid the intellectual ferment following the Mexican Revolution. A renegade and self-made revolutionary artist, Modotti immigrated from Italy to the U.S. in her late teens and became at various times a Hollywood silent film actress; the lover, model, and later protegée of famed photographer Edward Weston; and a communist activist and Soviet spy in Franco’s Spain. Author Mark Eisner is a scholar, editor, translator, and biographer whose Neruda: The Poet’s Calling (Ecco, 2018) was named a finalist for the PEN/Bograd Weld Prize for Biography.
