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| Marie Laure de Noailles by Man Ray, 1936 |
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| Vicomtesse de Noailles |
V i c o m t e s s e d e N o a i l l e s , was one of the 20th century's most daring and influential patrons of the arts, noted for her associations with Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Luis Buñuel and others as well as her tempestuous life and eccentric personality. She was the only child of Marie-Thérèse de Chevigné, a French aristocrat, and Maurice Bischoffsheim, a Paris banker of German Jewish and American Quaker descent. One of her great-great-great-grandfathers was the infamous M a r q u i s d e S a d e.
After a brief romance with the artist Jean Cocteau, Marie-Laure Bischoffsheim married in 1923, Arthur Anne Marie Charles, Vicomte de Noailles. Though events eventually transpired to reveal that Charles de Noailles preferred men sexually, the ill-matched couple had two daughters.
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| Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, Biceps and Jewellery, 1928, directed by Jacques Manuel |
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the couple were important patrons of modern art, particularly surrealism; they supported film projects by Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, and Luis Buñuel; and commissioned paintings, photographs and sculptures by Balthus, Giacometti, Constantin Brâncuși, Miró, and Dora Maar.
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| BrassaÏ, Marie-Laure de Noailles and Leonor Fini, Le bal des Têtes au Pré Catelan à Paris,1940's(C)RMN -@Jean-Gilles Berizzi |
Marie-Laure de Noailles's fabled hôtel particulier at 13 Place des Etats-Unis in Paris, which was built by her grandfather Bischoffsheim, is now the headquarters of B a c c a r a t, the crystal company.
Marie-Laure de Noailles had fabulous parties there and she loved to transform the interiors to suit her mood or theme of the party and her home was dedicated to artists, writers and musicians.
