Nahui Olin

(Mexico, 08/07/1893 - 23/01/1978)

Born María del Carmen Mondragón Valseca in Mexico City, Olin and her family moved to France when she was four years old for her father’s military career, and it was here she discovered poetry and started writing her own.

After meeting the Mexican diplomat and part-time painter Manuel Rodríguez Lozano (1891-1971) in Spain, the pair married in 1913 and returned to Paris where she revelled in the city’s artistic circles and bohemian lifestyle. Returning to Mexico in 1921, Olin began a long-term relationship with artist and political activist Gerardo Murillo (1865-1964), better known as Dr. Atl.

Deeply inspired by post-revolutionary desires to publicly assert connections to indigenous culture and past, Mondragón Valseca changed her name to Nahui Olin in 1922, a Nahuatl reference to renewal and the sun’s force behind the cyclic rhythm of the heavens, a symbol of earthquakes and change.

Olin’s relationship with Dr. Atl resulted in a period of intense creativity for both artists but her focus remained on portraits and scenes of everyday life. Like many of her fellow women artists, Olin also modelled for the era’s most famous male artists, including the likes of Diego Rivera (1886-1957), Jean Charlot (1898-1979), Edward Weston (1886-1958) and Antonio Garduño (1882-1958), and curator Mariano Meza described her modelling career as part of her artistic practice, as “drawing with her body”.

Throughout her life, Olin continued writing poetry and would eventually publish four poetry books: Óptica cerebral. Poemas dinámicos [Cerebral Optics. Dynamic Poems, 1922], Câlinement je suis dedans [Hugs I am inside, 1923], À dix ans sur mon pupitre [At ten years old on my desk, 1924] and Energía cósmica [Cosmic Energy, 1932].

In 1933, she fell in love with Spanish sailor Eugenio Agacino, who became the inspiration for some of her most vivid and explicit paintings, such as Nahui y Agacino frente a la isla de Manhattan [Nahui and Agacino in front of the Island of Manhattan, 1933] (above). Although, when Agacino died unexpectedly a year later, Olin withdrew from public life and artistic circles, eventually falling into artistic obscurity and leading her to support herself financially by selling copies of her photographs from when she was a model.

Nevertheless, Olin’s reevaluation of the expectations of femininity in modern Mexico, placed her on the fringes of society and was reclaimed as an early feminist icon in exhibitions such as Nahui Olin. La mirada infinita at the Museo Nacional de Arte in 2018 and Nahui Olin: A Woman Beyond Time at the National Museum of Mexican Art in 2007.

Image: Nahui Olin, Nahui and Agacino in Front of the Island of Manhattan (undated). Oil on plywood, 92 x 122.5 cm. Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico.