Lola Álvarez Bravo's Experiments In

Megan Flattley Department of Art History – Tulane University A World Built in Pieces: Lola Álvarez Bravo’s Experiments in Photomontage Thanks to the generous support of the Stone Center, I was able to travel to Mexico City for two weeks this summer. This time supplemented my research at the Lola Álvarez Bravo archive at the University of Arizona. The purpose of this study was to perform archival research and to see works by Lola Álvarez Bravo in the private collection of Beatriz Gonzalez Rendón. My project focuses on the photomontages of Álvarez Bravo and the Gonzalez Rendón Collection has the originals of many of these works, including some that were previously unknown. Beatriz Gonzalez Rendón graciously welcomed me into her home where the collection is carefully packed away in a spare room. I went there expecting to be able to perform close visual analysis, essential for the study of Art History, on these photomontages and then to leave. I had no idea the breadth of the Collection. The images were catalogued and digitized and may have counted over 1,000 prints. Additionally, biographical materials pertaining to Álvarez Bravo and her photographic work were in the collection, as well. The Rendón family had inherited an apartment that belonged to their aunt, Clementina Rivera. Lola Álvarez Bravo lived in this apartment for many years and when she left after the 1985 earthquake she left behind what is now the Gonzalez Rendón Collection. I was naturally stunned to find so much material and did not have the ability to go through it all that afternoon. Thus, I will need to return to Mexico City again this summer and I have been in contact with Sra. Rendón about helping her to organize the collection and perhaps get it placed in an institution. The other purpose for my trip to Mexico City was to perform archival research at the Centro de Estudios del Movimiento Obrero y Socialista (CEMOS). The majority of Álvarez Bravo’s early photomontages were published in the pages of the socialist education magazine, El Maestro Rural, and Frente a Frente, the cultural organ of the Leftist group, the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios. These publications, as well as those such as El Machete and Futuro, also reproduced the politically engaged photomontages of Soviet and German artists. Thus, it was my intention to go through these publications and document the examples of photomontage in order to see what role it played in these political magazines and what kind of photomontages Álvarez Bravo might have been exposed to. The most critical part of my research, however, was the examination of the socialist education magazine, El Maestro Rural. I am also very fortunate that our own Latin American library has a large collection of issues from this publication. This publication of the Secretaria de Educación Pública was in circulation from 1932 to 1944. Lola Álvarez Bravo was the principal photographer from 1935-1936, at the height of President Lázaro Cárdenas’s drive to modernize and socialize rural education. Thus, it is through her work in this publication that she first developed as a photographer. El Maestro Rural also published two of her first photomontages, El Sueño de los Pobres (1935), and Kapital Hambriento de Sobre Trabajo (1935). The photographs in this magazine document the modernization and industrialization of the Mexican nation. Álvarez Bravo traveled the countryside photographing industrial workers, school children, newly-installed telegraph lines, and the construction of roads and railway lines. This drive of modernization was closely linked with the cultural nation-building project of the postrevolutionary period. In this respect, it is possible to place Álvarez Bravo’s work in a dialogue with that of the Mexican muralists who also created work at the commission of the SEP. Álvarez Bravo frequently photographed the work of her considerably large circle of artist friends. She photographed Diego Rivera’s SEP and Palacio Nacional murals, she frequently took portraits of every important intellectual and artist in Mexico, including presidents. Her friendships with Juan Soriano, Frida Kahlo, and Maria Izquierdo were of particular importance because they frequently collaborated. Indeed, one of Álvarez Bravo’s forays into filmmaking was a script that she wrote for a film about Kahlo’s life, titled Naturaleza Vida. While researching at the Álvarez Bravo archive at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, I was able to access this script and also the roughly eight minutes of footage that Álvarez Bravo and Kahlo were able to film before the latter became too ill to continue. For these reasons my times spent in the collections of the Frida Kahlo Museum, the Museo de Arte Moderno, the Museo Anahuacalli, the Trotsky house, and the Palacio de Bellas Artes was imperative to my understanding of Álvarez Bravo’s work and the art historical moment in which she was working. Thus, my trip was successful in many ways. I did have plans to meet up with scholar, and Álvarez Bravo researcher, James Oles while I was in Mexico City. Unfortunately, our plans fell through. Despite this minor setback I came away from this trip with images of (nearly) every instance of photomontage in the magazines in the collection of CEMOS, an important new connection with Beatriz Gonzalez Rendón, and the necessary experience of seeing the physical space that Álvarez Bravo photographed, and the works of the artist friends who inspired her. .

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