Noche Crist
Noche Crist (née Maria Nicola Olga Ioan) (1909, Craiova, Romania – May 17, 2004, Washington, D.C.) was a Romanian American artist. Her eclectic mix of paintings, prints, installations and sculptures throughout her long life was unique. Life Brought up by a delicate mother, Juliet, who suffered from ill health and her capricious aunt, Mamoutz, 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, D. C. 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 there, after buying one of her watercolors, he insisted on meeting the artist and they fell in love. As his fiancée, he arranged for her to travel to Washington from Bucharest, just prior to the Communists taking over the