Noche Crist

Noche Crist, born Maria Nicola Olga Ioan, (1909-2004) in Craiova, Romania, was an idiosyncratic artist whose eclectic mix of paintings, prints, installations and sculptures throughout her long life was unique. Brought up by a delicate mother who suffered from ill health and her capricious aunt whose husband encouraged her to paint as a very young child, Noche survived two World Wars both in Bucharest and the Romanian countryside where the family had a small estate. She married Serban Grant in 1938 and divorced him in 1946. After leaving Bucharest in 1947, Crist continued to paint and write in Washington, DC using a complex iconography, much of it based on her life in Romania, until a few months before her death at the age of 95.

In 1945 she met David Crist, an American Air Force officer assigned to the Allied Control Commission in Bucharest. He attended one of Noche’s art shows where, after buying one of her watercolors, he insisted on meeting the artist and they fell in love. As his fiancee, he arranged for her to travel to Washington from Bucharest, just prior to the Communists taking over the Romanian government, and they married in 1947.

Noche Crist accompanied her husband on his military assignments to Hawaii and various European countries while developing her distinctive artistic style with little or no formal training. She exhibited in Hawaii, Frankfurt, Paris and elsewhere before settling in Washington DC in 1963. After several exhibitions in different venues, she co-founded Gallery 10 in 1974 and appeared there in both group and solo shows during the next two decades. The gallery became known for promoting and showcasing new artists under her influence.

Usually working with acrylic paints on wooden cut-outs and transparent polyester resin small sculptures, Crist created images reminiscent of her childhood at her family's country estate, Ograda, outside Bucharest. Her works depict dreamlike, surreal scenes of partially-dressed women posing seductively in opulent, sometimes fantastical, landscape settings. In other paintings and panels, she depicted bare-breasted women and felines sensually intertwined. She embraced silkscreen printmaking and experimented extensively with the medium. Her works gained a following among art patrons, including Olga Hirshhorn, one of Washington's leading art collectors.

In 1984 at Gallery 10 the first of several performances there and elsewhere was held, based on her Memoires, stories about her childhood and life in Romania. When her beloved husband, retired Air Force Col. David Crist, died in 1988, she recovered from this loss, with the help of a supportive circle of friends. Later, she continued writing her memoirs as the basis for short theatrical productions in 1989 and 1992 at the Washington Project for the Arts.

In 1995, the Washington Project for the Arts held a retrospective of 50 years of Mrs. Crist's work called "Noche Crist: Boudoirs and Lupanars." In 2002, the Millennium Art Center in Washington opened an installation of her artwork called the Pinck Room, a boudoir setting featuring her two- and three-dimensional artwork. Her last years were spent writing, drawing, and making small paintings at home where she had had a studio for over 40 years. Surrounded by a circle of devoted friends for whom she was a catalyst, she died peacefully at home. Mrs. Crist is buried next to her husband at Arlington National Cemetery.

References

Washington Post Obituary

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