The Nicéphore Niépce Museum joins the celebration of Lithuanian culture. The exhibition “Benoît Henri Tyszkiewicz, Between Lithuania and France” sheds light on the little-known work of Count Tyszkiewicz, a pioneer of Lithuanian photography, whose rediscovery in 1993 is largely due to the museum of Chalon-sur-Saône.
The Eye of Photohgraphy spoke with two of the three curators of this exhibition, Audrey Lebeault of the Niépce Museum and 19th-century Lithuanian photography historian, Dainius Junevičius.
Who was Count Tyszkiewicz?
Dainius Junevičius: The Count was born in December 1852 in Lithuania and moved to Paris as a young man. Photography became an important part of his life early on. Taking pictures for his own enjoyment, he joined the Société française de photographie in 1884. He became acquainted with the French Pictorialists Robert Demachy and Constant Puyo and gradually began to see photography as an art. In 1897, he joined the Pictorialist Paris Photo Club and was active in exhibitions. Around 1905, his interest in photography disappeared for unknown reasons, and he did not participate in exhibitions after 1906. He was thus active in photography for about 20 years. After 1915, he did not return to Lithuania but lived in France and Poland, where his daughter also lived. He died in 1935 and was buried in Nice.
Count Tyszkiewicz is said to have produced a body of over 20,000 prints and negatives. Long thought to have disappeared after World War I, some images resurfaced in the 1990s.
How was his work rediscovered?
D.J.: All his negatives and prints were believed to have been burned in 1915 in a fire at Villa St. Nazaire, where the photographer lived during the First World War. However, the photographer was brought back from oblivion by the appearance of the first major batch of his photographs in 1993. The Nicéphore Niépce Museum acquired 86 photographs in 1993 and organized an exhibition in 1994. It was then that the first wave of interest in the photographer began. Exhibitions were held in Vilnius, Kaunas, and an album was published in Lithuania. It was later confirmed that Tyszkiewicz was the author of the 76 photographs of an unidentified photographer found in Warsaw.
The second revelation came from Lithuanian collector Gediminas Petraitis, who, under undisclosed circumstances, found and brought nearly 700 photographs back to Lithuania a few years ago. Since then, new photographs have continued to appear at auctions, indicating that the source is not yet exhausted. The most recent surprise came earlier this year when another Lithuanian collector, Dominykas Šaudys, purchased nine of Tyszkiewicz’s photo albums at a Paris auction. Interestingly, we used to know only individual pages, but now we know what the albums looked like, and we will be able to show two of them to the public in this exhibition.
Audrey Lebeault, could you tell us more about the role of the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in the rediscovery?
Audrey Lebeault: The Nicéphore Niépce Museum is very proud to have contributed to the rediscovery of this talented photographer. In 1993, the Society of the Friends of the Nicéphore Niépce Museum purchased a set of 86 photographs glued onto 46 cardboard sheets from Mr. Georges Aboucaya, an antique dealer in Saint-Ouen. These sheets were part of a bound album. Most of the pages bear handwritten inscriptions in red and black ink, probably by Tyszkiewicz himself, with dates, captions of places visited, people photographed, and anecdotes. This collection was exhibited in 1994 at the Nicéphore Niépce Museum, and from then on, researchers and collectors took an interest. The photographs, once thought lost, began resurfacing.
More than 700 images were found and returned to Lithuania. Where is this collection held today?
D.J.: Most of Gediminas Petraitis’s collection is held by his heirs, but some of the photographs have been acquired by the most important museums in Lithuania, including the Šiauliai “Aušros” Museum, the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, and the Kaunas District Museum, which preserves Tyszkiewicz’s memory and was one of the initiators of the photography exhibition.
The exhibition was built from various collections, including those from the Kauno rajono muziejus (Kaunas), the Fotografijos muziejus (Šiauliai), the Lietuvos nacionalinis dailės muziejus (Vilnius), the Kretingos muziejus (Kretinga), and the private collections of Gražina Petraitienė (Vilnius) and Dominykas Šaudys (Kaunas). How did you proceed with the selection?
A.L.: My colleague Emmanuelle Vieillard and I traveled to Lithuania to visit the various locations where Tyszkiewicz’s photographs are kept and to make a selection from the hundreds of preserved prints. It was the most heartbreaking part of the exhibition project. However, looking on the bright side, Lithuanian collections still have immense potential for future exhibitions! We encourage our colleagues in Nice to take an interest in this body of work; the Lithuanian collections contain many photographs taken in Nice, a city he cherished and where he was buried.
The exhibition presents a selection from his reconstituted collection to the public for the first time since the 1994 Chalon-sur-Saône exhibition. What are the main themes of this exhibition?
A.L.: We chose to showcase Tyszkiewicz’s work in the two countries where he spent most of his life, Lithuania and France. We organized the scenography as a back-and-forth between these two worlds in which he lived, as he was a great traveler. We will present his life and family, whom he loved to photograph, his travels, his residences in Europe, especially in France and Lithuania, and his role in the French Pictorialist movement in Paris.
Can you tell us about one photograph of your choice from the exhibition?
D.J.: Among the photographs taken in Wiala, there is one showing the Tyszkiewicz family and some friends sitting on branches of an oak tree. This photograph is on the cover of Gediminas Petraitis’s collection album Retour. It reflects Tyszkiewicz’s attitude toward life—how to have fun and enjoy life. Just imagine how many ladders and helpers it took to create such an image. Perhaps it could inspire someone to overcome their fear of heights!
A.L.: I’m fond of his photographs of Isabelle Féraud, his friend and companion after the death of his wife. She appears in many of his images, captured in very gentle, posed attitudes, sometimes in more spontaneous shots, in intimate moments with friends, and even in humorous, disguised poses. With this vast collection, you almost feel like you’re touching the personality of his models. I also really admire the curious yet respectful eye he cast on the “common folk” he encountered—quite different from his aristocratic life. It’s worth noting that, besides Russian, Polish, and French, which he spoke fluently, Tyszkiewicz also had some knowledge of Lithuanian. This was rare for someone of his social rank at the time since it was a language spoken primarily by peasants.
More informations :
