In 1972, Cecilia Vicuña left Chile for London to study fine art. The following year, Augusto Pinochet launched a bloody military coup, transforming the country into a neoliberal dictatorship. In this new political climate, the freedoms celebrated by Salvador Allende’s government came under threat. Fearing for the safety of Vicuña’s work, Nemesio Antúnez, the artist and then director of the Santiago’s Museum of Fine Arts, hid the painting Karl Marx in his home. To protect the work from authorities, he painted over the philosopher’s name and replaced it with that of another radical, Charles Darwin.

Superficially, Antúnez’s decision may seem ironic or playful, given the fact that Darwinism throughout the twentieth century became the worldview of the reactionary right in search of ideological justifications for inequality. But for much of the early communist tradition, Marxism was a science that sought to explain the historical development of human societies. The juxtaposition of the two men is perhaps more fitting than one might think. Nevertheless, Vicuña’s depiction of the author of Capital strayed as far away from any scientific idea of socialism as could be imagined.

“In order to exalt Marx, I wanted to associate him with . . . eroticism, poetics, blues, jazz and rock, female and homosexual liberation,” Vicuña wrote in 1972. Her image of the theorist is set against a psychedelic garden, adorned with trees whose branches extend like intertwined hands and populated by naked figures in the throes of sexual embrace.