Noche Crist (1909-2004) was a Washington artist whose eclectic mix of paintings and sculptures evoking life's sensuality and pleasures made her a well-known figure of the avant-garde for nearly a half-century. She was born in Craiova, Romania with the name Maria Nicola Olga Ioan. There, her budding artistic talents had been nurtured by an eccentric uncle who encouraged her to paint, preferably women without clothes. Noche survived two World Wars, married and then divorced and, in the late 1940s, met David Crist, an American Air Force officer assigned to the Allied Control Commission in Bucharest. He attended one of Noche’s shows where after buying one of her watercolors he insisted on meeting the artist.
After they married, she accompanied him on his military assignments to Hawaii, Alabama, and elsewhere before settling in Washington, where she gradually found outlets for her creative instincts. One of them was making and selling Christmas cards with pictures of scenes from Georgetown. She also briefly taught at the now-defunct Institute of Contemporary Art in Washington.
Usually working with acrylic paints on wooden panels or shaped transparent polyester resin she created images reminiscent of her childhood at her family's country estate, Ograda, outside Bucharest. Her works had Central European flair as they depicted dreamlike scenes of partially-dressed women posing seductively in opulent, sometimes fantastical, landscape settings. In other paintings and plywood cutouts, she favored the bodies of bare-breasted women with feline heads locked in an embrace, as if dancing the tango. Her works gained a wide following among art patrons, including Olga Hirshhorn, one of Washington's leading art collectors.
Crist showed regularly in the Washington area, especially at Gallery 10, which she helped establish in the 1970s. Located on the second floor of a building in the 1500 block of Connecticut Avenue NW, the gallery became a venue to showcase and promote new artists.
Noche Crist organized shows at Gallery 10 until the death of her husband, retired Air Force Col. David S. Crist, in 1988. In the late 1980s, Mrs. Crist turned her visual artwork into performance art. With the help of friends, she used earlier art exhibits as the basis for a theatrical production at the Washington Project for the Arts in Northwest Washington. In 1995, the Washington Project for the Arts held a retrospective look at 50 years of Mrs. Crist's work called "Noche Crist: Boudoirs and Lupanars." In 2002, the Millennium Art Center in Washington opened a permanent installation of her artwork called the Pinck Room, a decorative setting featuring her sculptures, paintings and an assortment of erotic books.1
References Washington Post Obituary