Artwork Title: Nahui Olín

Nahui Olín, 1923

Edward Weston

This portrait of Nahui Olín belongs to a series of photographs that Weston referred to as "heroic heads." Sitters were chosen from among the circle of intellectual friends with whom he and his companion, Tina Modotti, associated during his years in Mexico. Here, the sitter is Carmen Mondragón (1896-1978), a Mexican poet and painter who grew up in Paris and who, upon her return to Mexico, took an Indian name meaning "four movements of the sun." Nahui Olín posed for Weston in November 1923, and the portrait was exhibited in his second show at the Aztec Land Gallery in Mexico City the following year. In his "Daybooks," Weston recorded that Nahui Olín was annoyed by the revealing nature of the portrait; he himself considered it, together with others from the same sitting, to be among the best pictures he had made in Mexico. It proved to be one of the most popular images in the exhibition and probably inspired these lines in a prose poem review by Francisco Monterde García Icazbalceta: ". . . cruelly, [Weston] prefers to guillotine heads in the noon sun: unreal necks and martyred eyes in harsh, insolent light." Flattering or not (and flattery would not have been Weston's concern), the image is a powerful expression of the photographer's piercing eye, a confrontational face-off between two equally strong personalities. (http://metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/283281) The beautiful and bohemian Maria del Carmen Mondragon Valseca, aka Nahui Olin was born in Mexico in 1893, so was 31 years old when Weston made this portrait of her in 1924. Mondragon was educated in Paris and there met Picasso, Matisse and Cocteau. She was a painter and occassional poet, but most of all she was an adventurous, sexy, beautiful woman, and she was the model and muse for many leading painters, such as Diego Riviera, as well as for leading photographers like Weston. (https://juliamargaretcameronsecession.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/edward-weston-nahui-olin-1924/)
Uploaded on Aug 26, 2016 by Suzan Hamer

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