Nusch Éluard (born Maria Benz; June 21, 1906 – November 28, 1946) was a French performer, model and surrealist artist, best known as the second wife of Paul Éluard.
Born in Mulhouse (then part of the German Empire), Maria Benz met Max Bill in the Odeon Café in Zurich who called her "Nusch", the name she would stick to. Their liaison ended after six months when Max Bill's plan to marry her in order to avoid her pending extradition from Switzerland was vetoed by the father (whom Max Bill at the time owed a substantial amount of money due to the expensive medical cures required after the accident that had forced him to leave the Bauhaus) [1].
Nusch arrived in France as a stage performer, variously described as a small-time actress, a traveling acrobat, and a "hypnotist's stooge". She met Paul Éluard in 1930 working as a model, married him in 1934, produced surrealist photomontage and other work, and is the subject of "Facile," a collection of Éluard's poetry published as a photogravure book, illustrated with Man Ray's nude photographs of her.
She was also the subject of several cubist portraits and sketches by Pablo Picasso in the late 1930s, and is said to have had an affair with him. Nusch worked for the résistance du. She died in 1946 in Paris, collapsing in the street of a stroke.
Biography