Nusch, the poet’s great love.
Nusch Éluard was born Maria Benz on June 21, 1906 in Mulhouse, when Alsace was annexed to the German Empire, and died on November 28, 1946 in Paris. She became Paul Éluard’s second wife in August 1934.
Born in a traveling circus, she may have been an illusionist’s assistant; she performed in theaters and posed for erotic postcards, as well as for Man Ray. Nusch also performed in avant-garde theaters in Berlin, cast in Strindberg plays.
On May 21, 1930, on the Grands Boulevards in Paris, she caught the eye of two passersby: René Char and Paul Éluard. Nusch was clearly a poor woman, who had difficulty writing French, which was not her native language. There is no need to follow the biographers like André Thirion (Révolutionnaires sans révolution, 1972,) who assumed her to have been a girl of questionable virtue.
"Nusch was Paul Éluard's salvation at a time when he felt utterly abandoned," wrote the poet Luc Decaunes, who was his first son-in-law and remained a true friend (Paul Éluard: L'amour, la révolte, le rêve, 1982).
According to several biographies, Paul Éluard offered his wife Nusch (her nickname came from the German Nuss, which means “nut” but also evokes nüscht, “nothing”) to his friend Picasso. Éluard was apparently drawn to threesomes: in the early 1920s, he had shared his first wife Gala with Max Ernst. This version is based on no proof whatsoever, but clearly Picasso was very fond of Nusch, as we can see when they pose as friends in the photographs from the times the Éluards stayed in Southern France. Up until the war, Nusch and Paul spent their summer holidays with Picasso, who affectionately called her “Onion Soup”.
Picasso made no less than 17 portraits of Nusch from 1936 onwards. While the young woman’s classical features were subjected to the artist’s disturbing interpretation right before the war (as in the portrait from the Berggruen collection, Nusch Éluard, 1937, pencil and charcoal on canvas, 55 x 46 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Museum Berggruen), his vision quickly evolved. The style of the 1941 portrait is almost primitive, as if the artist wanted to reaffirm the existence of the individual in the dehumanizing context of wartime (Portrait of Nusch Éluard (Madame Éluard), Paris, August 19, 1941, oil on canvas, 73 x 60 cm, Centre Pompidou). In a drawing from 1941 held in the Art Institute of Chicago collection, Nusch again appears elegant, calm, and peaceful.
From 1941 on, the Éluards went underground and lived mostly in Vézelay, with Yvonne and Christian Zervos, and later in Lozère.
His wife’s dramatic death from a brain hemorrhage in 1946 was devastating for Éluard, but also for Picasso, who could easily have made this beautiful claim of Éluard’s his own:
“November twenty-eighth, nineteen hundred and forty-six.
We shall not grow old together.
Today is one day
too many: time overflows.
My weightless love takes on the heaviness of torture.”
Paul Éluard (Le temps déborde, 1947)
1 / 2
Summary