Anita Brenner

Anita Brenner (born Hanna Brenner; 13 August 1905 – 1 December 1974) was a transnational Jewish scholar and intellectual, who wrote extensively in English about the art, culture, and history of Mexico.

She was born in Mexico, and raised and educated in the United States.

Anita Brenner was born 13 August 1905 in Aguascalientes, Mexico to Isador and Paula Brenner.

Her birth name was registered as Hanna.

Her parents were Jewish emigrants to Mexico from Latvia, and her father moved his family back and forth from Mexico to Texas during the Mexican Revolution.

Her fourth published book was The Wind That Swept Mexico; The History of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1942, having in between printed a guidebook and a children's story.

The first book to give a complete account in either English or Spanish on the Mexican Revolution, it was the first to retell the events from a Mexican perspective.

In 1916, when Brenner was 11, the family settled in San Antonio, Texas, but Brenner's nanny influenced her enduring passion for Mexico.

She briefly attended Our Lady of the Lake University and then took an English course with J. Frank Dobie at the University of Texas at Austin.

After two semesters she was able to persuade her father to let her return to Mexico, since she felt excluded by her university peers because of their antisemitism.

After her father had secured promises from Joseph Weinberger, of B'nai B'rith, a Jewish service organization, and his wife Frances Toor that they would look after her, Isador agreed to let Anita go.

Brenner moved to Mexico around the age of 18 and settled in Mexico City.

Frances Toor introduced Brenner to the community of international artists, refugees, and intellectuals then residing in the capital.

Brenner became an important member of this cosmopolitan circle and was an important link among them.

She was also an important voice for bringing the Mexican artistic florescence to the attention of readers in the U.S., effectively representing it north of the Mexican border.

For the first time in her life, Brenner felt accepted and began to explore her Jewish roots.

She worked for a brief period at B'nai B'rith, meeting recent Jewish immigrants at the port of Veracruz and helping them with their paperwork and resettlement.

Brenner quickly became part of the leftist bohemian group and as a journalist was a key voice in the indigenismo movement.

Carleton Beals and Ernest Gruening were influential U.S. journalists whom Brenner met in this early period of her career.

Beals helped her launch her publishing career.

She returned to Mexico in the 1920s following the Mexican Revolution.

She coined the term 'Mexican Renaissance', "to describe the cultural florescence [that] emerged from the revolution."

As a child of immigrants, Brenner's heritage caused her to experience both antisemitism and acceptance.

Fleeing discrimination in Texas, she found mentors and colleagues among the European Jewish diaspora living in both Mexico and New York, but Mexico, not the US or Europe, held her loyalty and enduring interest.

She was part of the post-Revolutionary art movement known for its indigenista ideology.

Brenner earned a PhD in anthropology at Columbia University and her first book, Idols Behind Altars was the first book to document the artworks, styles and artists of Mexico from Prehistory through the 1920s.

It was widely considered her most important work and was filled with photographs by renowned photographers and interviews with the most influential and prolific artists of the period.

At that time in Mexico, the Secretariat of Education (SEP) had established a cultural missions program, which began in 1923, where young people traveled the country and helped preserve indigenous culture.

Concha Michel, a friend of Anita's, participated in a similar program and gathered indigenous folk songs.

In 1924, her first published article was "The Jew in Mexico," published by The Nation, which Gruening had edited from 1920-1923.

President Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–28) offered Brenner her a scholarship to participate in the cultural preservation program.

In 1926, Brenner commissioned her friends Tina Modotti and Edward Weston to travel with her and take photographs for her upcoming book on Mexican decorative arts.

The National Autonomous University of Mexico provided funding for a two-volume series in which Brenner planned to document artworks in Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacan, Oaxaca, Puebla and Querétaro.

Modotti and Weston also took personal photographs of Brenner.

The differences between them point to the different aesthetics of the photographers.

Weston was known for the abstract qualities of his highly focused and "precisely composed black-and-white images of semi-abstract nudes, landscapes, and organic forms".

His photographs of Brenner's back are devoid of human interest and a study of form.

Modotti attempted to capture scenes and personality, and social context over form were emphasized.

Her photographs of Brenner show her dressed in a man's suit and fedora.

She was Gruening's research assistant for his book, Mexico and Its Heritage, which he spent five years developing in Mexico before it was published in 1928.