The best-known Mexican photographer of the twentieth century, Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902–2002) spent his life in the country of his birth. He bought his first camera in 1924, and by the thirties began to establish himself as a significant artist. His cultural circle included the country’s leading resident artists and writers, as well as the many visitors who came to Mexico during this period. These figures included photographers Tina Modotti, Paul Strand, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, and the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. When Surrealist founder André Breton visited Mexico in 1938, he was impressed with Bravo’s work: “Never before has reality fulfilled with such splendor, the promises of dreams.”1
Deeply rooted in contemporary and indigenous Mexican culture, his work was strongly shaped by its social and political environment of revolutionary idealism. Bravo’s photographs were infused with Surrealist ambiguity, but he did not limit himself to one stylistic ideology in his work and drew from folk art and Spanish colonial painting. The result was a highly poetic
personal vision, his iconography grounded in ancient and modern Mexican art, as well as a strong sense of cultural nationalism, an omnipresent sensibility of death, and unusual visual juxtapositions drawing on dreams and the unconscious.
Bravo frequently photographed the human figure, the inspiration of several of his most evocative images, including Daughter of the Dancers (1933) and Portrait of the Eternal (1935). Images of ordinary people doing ordinary labor are also common, as are formal portraits of the many well-known artists and cultural figures he knew, notably René d’Harnoncourt, Frida
Kahlo, David Alfaro Siqueros, Diego Rivera, and Rufino Tamayo. But overall, nudes are more unusual in his oeuvre. The ten palladium prints in the Solari Foundation Collection portfolio represent a forty-four year span of time, ranging in date from 1936 to 1980. The prints were published in 1981 when the artist was seventy-eight (he would live to be one hundred years old).
The portfolio is introduced by a fragment of “Song of Songs,” a poem written by nineteenth century German poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) in 1854.2 Based on the Biblical Solomon’s Song of Songs, that celebrates the sensual delights of passionate love, Heine’s lines set the tone for the images that Bravo has chosen:
the body of woman
is a poem
that, at the prompting
of the spirit,
wrote God,
Our Lord,
in the great album
of Nature.
The earliest work in the suite is Espejo Negro (Black Mirror) of 1936, which depicts a seated nude in hot sun. The other photograph from the thirties is La Desvendada (The Unbandaging) of 1938. In its use of bandages, it relates closely to one of his most famous and enigmatic images, The Good Reputation, Sleeping done in the same year, which was published on the cover of a catalogue accompanying an exhibition of surrealist art in Mexico City. The model was a young woman named Alicia, and she posed regularly for classes at the school where Bravo taught photography, the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes de San Carlos (the series was shot on the roof of the school). She is also the subject of the Solari print, in which she has been photographed standing in an opening of the plain building, a drainpipe angled up the wall beside and above her in a “Y” shape. Her eyes are closed, suggesting a trance-like state, and she holds some of the bandaging in her left hand. Another photograph, The Unbandaged # 3 (J. Paul Getty Museum) was taken outside the same building.
Six of the images date from the seventies. Título: Sin Título (Title: With-out Title) (1978) was taken inside, creating a mysterious composition with the shadows of the windowpanes. Several were taken outside, including Siesta en la Hierba (Siesta in the Grass) (1976) and La del Pirú (She of the Piru Tree) (1978). One is horizontal, while the other is vertical, partially shielded by grass and leaves. Xipetotec (1979) holds her robe as would have the Aztec god of fertility, spring, and agriculture of the same name (Xipe Totec) held his flayed skin. Bravo has transposed the god’s gender to convey the fruitfulness of the female form. Bravo’s robustly sensuous
Diosa, Historia (Goddess, History), also from 1979, embodies the physicality that is at the heart of Heine’s poem (in some publications she is titled Venus).
The two photographs dating from 1980 present a strong contrast. In Que cae or Falling, a woman stretched on her back seems to tumble off the bed, a dazed expression on her face. Salomé, posed by the same window as Titulo: Sin Titulo, presents the lush center of her body, with only her torso and upper legs visible.
Fruta Prohibida (Forbidden Fruit) of 1976 conveys the fragmented sensibility of desire and temptation that is fundamental to this entire portfolio. Her face is not visible (indeed, only two of the nudes are shown complete), which adds to her mystery. The corn plant in front of her conveys both fecundity and Mexican locality. Her upper body is covered in a shawl made of a traditional pattern, and only her left breast and hands are visible. Another nude of 1970 not in this portfolio is titled Temptations at Antonio’s House (Tentaciones en casa de Antonio), an explicit allusion to the Temptations of St. Anthony. At the end of his career, unable to leave his studio, Bravo returned to the female nude, observing wryly: “It wasn’t the sort of work
one can complain about.”3
Betsy Fahlman
Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Fruta Prohibida, 1976, DIEZ DESNUDOS (portfolio), 1981, palladium print, 18.4 x 24.1 cm, SOLARI 91.014.005L