CUARTOSCURO / Articulos

LOLA ÁLVAREZ BRAVO
By Raquel Tibol
In en Ser y ver / Mujeres en las artes visuales, Plaza y Janés Ed., México, 2002.
[ Translated by Georganne Weller-Ford ]

Young intellectuals sensitized by feminism at the beginning of the eighties in the 20th century launched a campaign to redeem some feminine figures. One of these figures was the excellent photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo (1907-1993).

Modelo Boss, © Lola Álvarez Bravo

Thanks to her vivacity and vitality, Lola was then living through her fourth or fifth stage of youth. Her enthusiasm was such that some of these intellectuals thought they were the first to praise her work, a cultural activist whose presence on the Mexican scene was not continuous over seven decades, but her young friends had forgotten that she had presented a collection of one hundred portraits of prominent Mexicans at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City in 1965, all of which had meticulously been selected by Lola herself, with her sharp sense of self-criticism. In spite of this, these young intellectuals claimed that the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA) had not shown sufficient or frequent enough interest in her to allow her vast work to be exhibited in greater depth.

As a testimony to the happy encounter of Lola with this group of young people, we have the book Lola Álvarez Bravo: A Photographic Recounting (Ed. Penélope, 1982, Colección Arte-Fotografía), which included new and old texts, even one written by Luis Cardoza y Aragón, to introduce the one hundred portraits exhibited in 1965. For the new texts the technique used by Herbert Read in his monography on a much-admired friend, the sculptress Barbara Hepworth, was employed: make the protagonist speak. In these cases the interlocutor depends on the richness and variety of the story. Judging by the highlights of Lola’s confessions, one might suspect that listeners were tempted by memories which referred to a fun Bohemian experience among cordial friends, and didn’t insist enough on recognizing the knowledge Lola achieved by continuously exercising her vocation, although there were exceptions.

In the talk captured by Manuel Fernández Perera in “Photography, an Internal Pleasure”, Lola sustained that she had searched for her motives, themes and takes, but not excessively so. She compared her work to a painter’s work, who when making a sketch can eliminate, add, or modify it to that of a photographer, and said, “Photography doesn’t allow you to erase, you have to repeat”, a truth which has marked a fundamental difference in the mode of production. She also pointed out that similarities exist with other artistic practices. “Sometimes good results please me and other times they scare me”, and I say, “Well, after this what am I going to do?”

Psiquiatra Popular, © Lola Álvarez Bravo

On the one hand Lola pointed to the camera’s terrible indiscretion, and on the other, the fact that what is captured by the photographer as raw material should be elaborated on in the take. Lola Álvarez Bravo used a revealing term: frolicking. It was with delight that she insisted that “There’s always some frolicking, irony, play.”

“Frolicking, rapture and pranks make you discover.”

Mexican misery has been captured and continues to be recorded by many photographers (painters, sculptors and etchers as well) as something picturesque, but Lola goes beyond this decadent outlook:

There is widespread confusion about this type of photographs with a third world approach, or where one appears to take delight in misery. I hope to work with it in such a way that it isn’t offensive, but also to show a state of affairs. In any case, photographs of misery will serve to awaken good and bad consciousness and therefore neither quick sympathy nor simple congeniality should be allowed.
Her analysis of Tina Modotti, her mentor in a way, was accurate:

She was (her eyes) made for abstract plastics, and in her ideological trajectory she changed her abstract techniques and emotions and turned them into rich expressions full of aesthetics to serve her in her battles and for her ideology. In Mexico Tina matured as a fighter and channeled her work along these lines. It wasn’t a simple art of struggle, but a true art, as deep as her struggle was wholesome.

The Photographic Recounting contains an excellent selection of 119 photographs: landscapes, portraits, important personalities, situations and photographic studies. We continuously find affection and a fondness for human beings: children, women, men, celebrities, and even monstrosities observed with tenderness, a tenderness that never degenerated into sugar-coating or false sentimentality which, as she herself warns us, was always avoided.

Soñando, © Lola Álvarez Bravo

The first chapter, an autobiography, was written by Luis Zapata. In this chapter we see a clear and convincing trace of Lola’s rebelliousness against the traditional role of women. She paid dearly for this, but earned the right to speak and shout out with her own will and own voice. The second autobiographic chapter was written by José Joaquín Blanco. In this chapter we find a passage on her married and professional life with Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1925-1934).

Manuel wouldn’t let me take many pictures. He had me as an assistant. When we were developing the pictures I would always say “Let me do it”, and he would answer “No, just move them around”, and then I would insist again with “At least let me develop mine”, but he would respond “No, just move them, dip them.”

One of her best friends was another “liberated” woman, María Izquierdo, with whom she lived after her break with Manuel Álvarez Bravo. There were many reasons for identifying with María, which Lola has clearly stated:

At that time, in the mid-thirties, those of us who worked as women were able to achieve something, and people respected us at work for our efforts, but there weren’t many of us. This wasn’t because you had to be especially brave to work, since there was no persecution against women, even though we did raise a few eyebrows, but rather because you really had to want to work.

It is unfortunate that the interviewers didn’t get more information from Lola and her opinion regarding Emilio Amero, a lithographer, photographer and theoretician, and once the art director of the magazine Futuro, who was a well-versed and talented man. Lola narrated that she, Amero and the painter Julio Castellanos were the founders of the first movie club in Mexico City, which at the beginning was in the auditorium of the University of San Ildefonso and later in a modest hall at the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, but she did not reflect these avant-garde moves in her photography.

There was no lack of audience for the stories about drunkards personified by renown artists and intellectuals. Luis Cardoza y Aragón, a constant participant at gatherings in Maria Izquierdo’s house, was particularly humorous.

There Luis Cardoza would get drunk beyond recognition on many occasions and in front of everybody would put drinking glasses in his pockets and then when he was about to go, leave them one by one, completely drunk, on each stair step. Luis was very lively and excitable, a hopeless party animal, and got himself involved in adventures with the ladies time after time and was on the verge of dying at the hands of Othello.

Contando Estrellas, © Lola Álvarez Bravo

A Photographic Recount was rounded out with some old texts. In addition to a fine text on photographic portraits by Cardoza y Aragón, there are paragraphs by Andrés Henestrosa, Alejandro Gómez Arias and Antonio Peláez. The book ends with three texts by her admirers Carlos Monsiváis, José Joaquín Blanco and Manuel Fernández Perera. The common denominator in all of these texts can be synthesized by Gómez Arias’ paragraphs.

I thought it was surprising that a woman so involved in the fascinating life of a turbulent Mexico at that time could be so inflexibly rigorous and austerely disciplined in her professional life. Or maybe that wasn’t so contradictory… passionately Mexican, her works (with no folkloric touches) include personalities, anonymous people, striking women and humble beauties, landscapes and earthy examples, her people. These are historic documents, with no retouching or deceptions, but never cold or inhumane. There was a certain real life to them and a subtle, veiled and discreet poetry about them. In other words, she used her full technical command as a precision instrument, the means by which one could create language capable of expressing answers to the questions changing times presented. This solid knowledge and an extraordinary sensitiveness produced not only quality, but also a naked modernity of creations and, of course, the presence of a personality not to be confused with any other – it could only be Lola.

One of the examples of Lola Álvarez Bravo’s human touch is her monologue on solitude:

Solitude prolongs your life tremendously. If I live alone, I have plenty of time to think, to make decisions, to solve everything in my life, to be my own company. In this way you are better prepared, you can better appreciate and enjoy being with others, you have more room for thinking and rethinking then when you’re always surrounded by people. You have time to pass profound judgment about yourself, of thinking whether you think right or not, or if you don’t think, if you feel well, or if you don’t feel at all. You begin to form a cult around your solitude and you see it as an empire that you have formed around yourself, one in which you let the people you care about in and when you don’t want anybody to come in, you shut the door and that’s it.

Who does the Negative Belong to?

Lola Álvarez Bravo went through life sprightly. She preferred frolicking at work to being intriguing in her free time. She didn’t have very many enemies and highly valued friendships, but her widespread kindness would immediately disappear if she felt her author’s rights were being stepped on. In this field and in others, she was a forerunner in Mexico.

La Espina, © Lola Álvarez Bravo

Author’s rights for photographers turned into a concern in Mexico in 1977, when the Mexican Council of Photography was founded. Before that authors had to defend themselves as best they could or according to intuition. From the very beginning of her professional career Lola Álvarez Bravo felt that the eye of the photographer placed on the materials meant they were his property, no matter who might have acquired them in their virgin state. According to her the plate or film only took on a given value when the eye of the photographer turned them into unique negatives which, once printed, would yield a documentary service or the ensuing aesthetics. From here stemmed an unalienable right according to her.

The first of several shocks stemming from this personal interpretation of author’s rights came about in 1941 from within the Institute of Aesthetic Investigations at the National University, founded in 1936, after having absorbed the Art Laboratory established in 1935. The first director of the Institute, named by the rector of the university, Chico Goerne, was the poet Rafael López, and the deputy director for a brief period was the young lawyer Alejandro Gómez Arias. By broadening the scope of responsibilities and the budget as well, the decision was made to include a photographer on the staff, who was to be given a salary and materials. The choice was Lola Álvarez Bravo, who started off with a simple task: to photograph the Florentine Codices, and another very complicated one: to record with the greatest detail possible the choir stalls of the ancient Church of Saint Agustin, or what remained of the church. These stalls had been installed in 1933 in the assembly hall of the National Preparatory School, which was known to the students as “The Little General” (El Generalito). The choir stalls were made of walnut between 1701 and 1702 by a team from Ocampo, whose members had passed an examination to prove their abilities to represent dressed or nude human figures, animals, foliage, fruits, etc. The cost of the work was 240 thousand pesos. Originally the stalls had covered three walls of the upper choir section of the convent church, where many friars, novices and lay brothers had been seated. In 1861 the church was dismantled with the enforcement of the Juárez laws and the stalls were stored in a warehouse.

Rosario Castellanos, © Lola Álvarez Bravo

Some eighteen pieces were lent to the National Museum in 1885 and three years later were given to the National Preparatory School, but it wasn’t until 1933 that the decision was made to place in the “Little General’s Room” what remained of this magnificent collection, which by now was incomplete from being transferred so many times. As a action of artistic redemption it was decided to document these stalls through photography and Alejandro Gómez Arias charged Lola Álvarez Bravo with this task, pointing out that she had to make a test run with the seats of honor, canopies, high and low reliefs, seals, scrolls, marine shells, apples, monsters, caryatids in shields and atlantes with a nude torso, exalting the unnatural profusion that had served to represent biblical passages from Genesis and Revelations. In the autobiographical evocations authored by Manuel Fernández Perera, Lola remembered the difficulties of that task:

The job in the “Generalito” was an odyssey. I had to improvise all the trappings to be able to work - put one table on top of the other, and a chair on top of both of them. It was just awful, because there wasn’t enough furniture for me to climb up on to reach the average height of the planks. I used everything in sight to set up my platform and do the job, and then the reflectors left me looking like a piece of burnt caramel candy. It was a very hard job, but I managed to do it.

In effect, her photographs were excellent and when in 1941 the Institute of Aesthetic Investigations decided to publish Choir Stalls in the Old Church of Saint Agustín, a study by Rafael García Granados, in two volumes with a total of 69 illustrations, the photographic material which had to go with it was undoubtedly Lola Álvarez Bravo’s. In the prologue we see that “almost all of the photographs that appear in this monography” had been taken by her, but it also stated that “Unfortunately the negatives are not in the archives of the Institute, but in the hands of the artist”. These words show the defeat of Manuel Toussaint, the Institute’s director at that time and who, on March 20, 1939, had written a letter to Lola informing her that her job as photographer was to end and that she should return the negatives and photographic material in her possession. Among the negatives were eight extremely valuable codices she had been asked to reproduce in 1938: Savornani was attributed to Hernán Cortés, Haklyt to Alonso de Santa Cruz, and there was also the one produced by Gómez de Trasmonte in 1628, Martín de Mayorga’s from 1782, and Alzate’s, the iconographer from Revillagigedo, Almonte’s guide and Alonso de Santa Cruz’ book Islario.

Sin título, © Lola Álvarez Bravo

Complaints came and went, but Lola was firm in her principle that any negative she worked on was hers. In this light all the negatives she worked on during her tenure as photographer in the Department of Publicity at the Ministry of Public Education and the National Institute of Fine Arts, were hers. For example on June 9, 1949, she gave to Fernando Gamboa, the director of the Department of Plastic Arts at INBA the inventory from the workshop, complete with photographic apparatus, tools, lamps, liquids, absolutely everything except the negatives, so that the official archives were to be enriched under the government of Adolfo López Mateos, when the Presidency acquired 2,544 8 x 10.5, 5 x 7 and 4 x 5 inch negatives, which reproduced a good part of 19th and 20th century art in Mexico, including David Alfaro Siqueiros, Ramón Alva de la Canal, Abraham Ángel, Ignacio Aguirre, Raúl Anguiano, Adolfo Best Maugard, Juan Cordero, Olga Costa, Miguel Covarrubias, Jean Charlot, José Chávez Morado, Amado de la Cueva, Jesús Guerrero Galván, Francisco Gutiérrez, María Izquierdo, Frida Kahlo, Agustín Lazo, Fernando Leal, Gabriel Fernández Ledesma, Ricardo Martínez, Carlos Mérida, Roberto Montenegro, Nefero, Juan O’Gorman, Pablo O’Higgins, José Clemente Orozco, Carlos Orozco Romero, Trinidad Osorio, Máximo Pacheco, Feliciano Peña, Antonio Pujol, Fermín S. Revueltas, Diego Rivera, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, Julio Ruelas, Antonio Ruiz, Federico Silva, Juan Soriano, Rufino Tamayo, Tebo, José María Velasco, Roberto Berdecio, Alfredo Zalce, Germán Cueto, Lorenzo Rafael, Mardonio Magaña, Carlos Dublán, Ignacio Asúnsolo, and other anonymous artists. In 1976 this extremely valuable collection of works was handed over to the National Institute of Fine Arts. It constituted a long history of Mexican art in images made with perseverance and with the peculiar opportunity of having the privilege of registering them. In this regard she told Helen Krauze (newspaper Novedades, April 17, 1962): “My life has been alongside famous intellectuals and their works and this has provided me with an education, to have the ideas that I hold and to be who I am, if I am somebody.”

And she told Manuel Fernández Perera that:

I believe that most of my achievements can be attributed to an education in plastics. If I hadn’t followed the works of painters so closely and studied so much when reproducing the sense of composition and balance in their paintings and murals, perhaps I would have taken much longer with my photographs. The study of plastic arts was very helpful to me and gave me a more complete and precise idea of the huge importance of light, composition and volume. The fact that I was so familiar with paintings greatly helped me in my efforts to compose.

Pita Amor, © Lola Álvarez Bravo

Landscapist and Promoter

If someone were to hear Lola Álvarez Bravo say “I hardly work with landscaping, since it doesn’t take into account our senses, and given that I always do what I like, it is unusual for me to get into photographing landscapes, because I know I am going to err, because I can’t get into it as a photographer”, should not believe her. Images such as Erongarícuaro (ca., 1945), Cielo, mar y tierra (1950), Palenque, Tula, Duna (taken around 1950) are enough to situate her as a broad scope, sensitive and a crack landscapist in her perception of terms and tones. But, in addition to her historic consciousness of what this artistic genre means in culture, particularly in Mexican culture, she openly expressed this idea at the inauguration of the Contemporary Art Gallery, with the exhibit El paisaje de México en la plástica y en la poesía, organized in collaboration with the supplement published by the newspaper Novedades, México en la Cultura.

Painters, writers and poets formed a large family when I began to understand, together with them, Mexico’s art and beauty. I heard the poet gloss over in forms and in color the landscaping of the land, and the painter, moved, to comment on this in poetry. Thus I saw mankind take over the sky and the land in Chi-Chén, Uxmal, Teotihuacán and Monte Albán. I also witnessed a tragic hell in the deserts of Baja California, Sonora, the mountain chain of Chihuahua, and the tragic case of the Mezquital.

The scale of landscaping in Mexico is grandiose. It makes man lose himself or turn into an insignificant polychromatic spot, but the artist with even greater concerns does not resign himself to disappearing in the midst of this indifferent veracity. The artist, always struggling, fights to achieve his grandeur and to be able to express himself on the same scale, only later to project, by reflex, his emotions once again toward mankind (Novedades, August 22, 1954).

To be able to launch an art gallery in 1951 where there used to be a photographic study on Amberes St. No. 12, in an area which was still not known as the Pink Zone, nor was for tourists, Lola Álvarez Bravo was helped by Raúl Abarca, whom she had met in 1946, as a student at the Photographic Workshop that she headed at the National School of Plastic Arts. Before, in an informal and sporadic manner, she used to present the works of some close friends. Regular activities here, which in a revamped gallery for this express purpose, began in October, 1951, and by 1952 the gallery presented a sample of José Clemente Orozco’s gouaches and drawings (February 15 – March 1).

His prestige was consolidated with the first anniversary of the supplement México en la cultura, part of the Novedades newspaper, with the noteworthy collection of De Carnavales a Judas en la plástica de México (March – April, 1952), after many discussions on what was Mexican, held by a group of intellectuals composed of Samuel Ramos, Silvio Zavala, José Gómez Robledo, Francisco de la Maza, Jesús Montejano, Henrique González Casanova, José Moreno Villa, Juan José Arreola, Leopoldo Zea, Emilio Uranga, Justino Fernández, Manuel Romero de Terreros, Fernando Salmerón, Pablo González Casanova and others. The exhibit organized by Lola was echoed and was a testimony to this polemic situation of historic transcendence. Lola was pleased by the growing prestige of her gallery and prepared a much-talked about closing session. For her successful showing on April 12, Holy Saturday, on the corner of Amberes and Reforma, she offered the burning of Judas.

From April 13–27, 1953, the most important exhibit of the whole seven and a half years the Gallery of Contemporary Art existed, was held in honor of Frida Kahlo, a project conceived by Lola a year before, according to Adrián Villagómez. During the same interview Lola expressed her opinion regarding some feminine personalities that were on the front page:

Lupe Marín is the earth of Mexico; Adela Formoso, a wonderful organizer; Dolores del Río, a well-traveled social star; María Asúnsolo, friendly and kind; María Izquierdo, a great artist for the colorfulness and Mexican naivety in her paintings were all present, but, Frida Kahlo was considered to be the most perfect artist with the circle of painters (Novedades, May 4, 1952).

Her admiration for Frida led her to carry out one of the most suggestive series of portraits. Lola’s kind camera made Frida act to the hilt and express her spirituality. The images attest to a poetic encounter between two friends. Another beloved model that Lola appreciated was the painter, engraver, and missionary teacher Isabel Villaseñor (1909-1953) who, just like her and María Izquierdo, had been born in Jalisco. Chabela, her nickname, was discovered in movies by Sergei M. Eisenstein, who gave her the role of María in the “Maguey” episode in the movie ¡Qué viva México! in 1931.

In 1941, in Chachalacas, Veracruz, Lola Álvarez Bravo painted Chabela’s beautiful body, drapped in a loose white nightshirt, her long dark hair flowing behind her, her mestizo face turned upwards, together with the trunk of a tree and a palisade, in the photograph El ensueño, a soft erotic metaphor of a young woman possessed by light. Also noteworthy is the portrait she painted in 1947, which was reproduced in catalogue 45 Autorretratos de pintores mexicanos, siglos XVIII al XX, and presented at the Palace of Fine Arts.

On the first anniversary of the premature death of Chabela Villaseñor, in March of 1954, the Gallery of Contemporary Art presented an exhibit in her honor, commented on, among others, by Pablo Fernández Márquez:

In Lola Álvarez Bravo’s gallery, an exceptional woman for many reasons, many important events devoted to the work of women artists have been held. We will always remember with great emotion that solemn moment not too long ago when Frida Kahlo entered the gallery on Amberes St. on a stretcher, only to receive one of the most affectionate and intimate tributes that anyone could ever receive from her personal friends and art supporters. The act on the 15th of March of the same year, in the same gallery, was in many ways similar to this one, but was different in the fact that the heroine was absent. At a posthumous tribute with physical absence, the work and spirit of the artistic woman of exquisite sensitivity were present, seducing people with the same grace and same charm to which they were attracted during her lifetime. (Newspaper El Nacional, March 28, 1954).

Together with Chabela’s gouaches, monotypes, etchings and paintings, Lola brought together portraits done by her of her friends, as well as by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Alfredo Zalce, Angelina Beloff, Raúl Anguiano, Juan Soriano, Gabriel Fernández Ledesma and others. Lola demonstrated once again that the Gallery of Contemporary Art knew how to honor friendship.

A Sad Farewell

Lola was not an intimate friend of Tina Modotti, but rather it was Manuel Álvarez Bravo who was her true friend from 1927 on. Lola was the beloved wife of the friend, the woman who had the human quality of drawing closer to the other woman when she knew that the other woman in February, 1930, was about to be deported, and that in 48 hours she had to sell some of her simple belongings to face both an uncertain and a somewhat threatening future. It was then when Lola bought from Tina her Graflex camera that had once belonged to Edward Weston, plus another 8 x 10 one that would be useful to her in her studio. A few years later the Graflex was to become an ef€cient instrument for work out on the street, after her marriage of almost ten years fell apart, when Lola found in photography a way of earning a living, both materially as well as spiritually. From Tina’s letters that Lola kept, written after Tina was ousted from Mexico in February, 1930, written aboard the ship Edam and from Berlin, it was confirmed that the real friend was Manuel and Lola was the wife of the friend. This is why it is particularly interesting to read feminine literature on the episode of Tina’s farewell at the train station as told by Lola to Christiane Barckhausen-Canale, Tina’s biographer:

Manuel Álvarez Bravo is firm, to date, in that he was the only person who went with Tina to the railroad station; however, Lola is unable to explain her husband’s poor memory. “I remember that all three of us – he, our small son and I – all went with her. It’s impossible that he has forgotten that Tina, at the door of the railroad car, touched my boy’s head and told him that she was sure some day of seeing a better Mexico, a country in improved conditions. I, at least, will never forget that scene.”

With a straightforward attitude, holding no grudge when stating this, Lola defended her life, she was not willing to be deprived of her experiences, but she hadn’t assumed an advocate’s attitude either, she was only brought up that extra-personal attitude and profoundly allegoric moment with her son, when an unfortunate woman fondly deposited in him her sad hopes for the future. This same touch of gentleness filtered through Lola Álvarez Bravo’s works and deeds.

Lola Álvarez Bravo, Select Photographs, 1934-1985 was her best individual exhibit, and was shown in the now extinct Contemporary Art Cultural Center between October, 1992 and January, 1993. Her last work was associated with this Center and dealt with the new edition in press in June, 1993. It was a dream of Acapulco, a book initially published in 1951, with eighty photographs of hers and texts written by Francisco Tario, J.M. López, and Carlos Mérida. For this second edition Lola had the help of the director of the photographic archives at that time in this Center, Victoria Blasco. The number of copies printed was unheard of in Mexico at that time: some 20 thousand. It was marketed as support for this magnificent photographer in her old age, but who was to die shortly afterwards.