Born in 1893 as María del Carmen Mondragón Valseca, Nahui Olin left behind a legacy of a life: one characterized by tumult, infamy, heady romance, and a propensity to document it in paint. The daughter of a diplomat in exile, she spent her early years in Paris and Spain, where she would befriend the likes of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, before settling in Mexico in 1921. In youth she was renowned as a staggering beauty—modeling for Diego Rivera, Edward Weston, and Jean Charlot, among others—and is most often remembered as such. Olin was, however, both muse and artist, and her paintings, lushly articulated, vigorously saturated, and intimately scaled, serve as annals of her life and great loves and remind us that this renegade of a woman was far more than a face.

Nahui y Agacino bailando en la proa del barco Habana, en Nueva York was completed following the dissolution of one of her most formative relationships: her storied affair with Gerardo Murillo Coronado, known as Dr. Atl. Although it bears stylistic similarities to the landscape master’s work in its rhythmic layering of color, the subject and flatly modern rendering are purely her own. Executed in shades of brown, ultramarine, and fluorescent orange, the present work is laced with a palpable eros. Olin, fitted with her signature bob and hyperbolic green eyes, clings to Eugenio Agacino, with whom she was romantically involved beginning in 1929. Their bodies are tangled in dance, forming a helix that runs down the center of the composition, perhaps suggesting, even, that the ferocity of their love must be scientifically ordained.