TINA MODOTTI: A Fragile Life <i> by Mildred Constantine (Chronicle Books: $18.95; 189 pp.)</i>

The legend of Tina Modotti is compounded by art and revolution, sex and scandal, pseudonyms and phony passports. She was recognized as a remarkable beauty and a great mystery; this reissue sets out to “lift the veil” of the artist and revolutionary through more photos and new text. A poor Italian immigrant who worked in San Francisco textile factories and as a silent film actress in Hollywood, the legend of Modotti was born of her affair with American photographer Edward Weston, to whom she was model, student and lover. The pair moved to Mexico in 1923, a time of political and artistic revolt. There they held great parties and associated with revolutionaries, artists and politicos. Tina’s photography talents bloomed as she became known for her brilliant images of murals, colonial sculpture, folk art and children, and her compassionate portrayal of the country’s poor. Meanwhile, her arresting beauty, unrepressed sexuality and numerous liaisons earned her a reputation of promiscuity, a femme fatale. Such characterizations were irksome to the woman who would become devoted to Communism and whose lovers were largely militants of like ideology, such as Cuban activist Julio Antonio Mella. His murder, just three months after their affair began, started a hideous public scandal that eventually led to her arrest and expulsion from Mexico in 1929. Modotti spent her next years in Berlin, the Soviet Union, Paris and Spain during its Civil War years, having abandoned her camera for full-time activism until she returned to Mexico in 1939 carrying “absolutely authentic false papers.” When she died suddenly in 1942, old rumors resurfaced and new ones flourished. Her legend is the setting for the photographs, both those taken of her by Weston, and her own humane images of revolutionary Mexico for which she is most remembered.