Butzbach, a Belfortain guardian of Man Ray's treasure

Pierre-Yves Butzbach, from Belfort, has been managing the reproduction rights to Man Ray's works for the heirs of his last muse, Juliet, for the past twenty years.

Pierre-Yves Butzbach, the young man from Belfort who dreamed of becoming a filmmaker while attending the film club his ENT-stricken father took him to, certainly never expected to one day be immersed in such a creative whirlwind and become the guardian of the treasure of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. "After my studies, I had created my own audiovisual production company in Paris when a friend called me to ask if I would be interested in doing photographic reproduction work. That's how I ended up with 6,000 vintage Man Ray prints. It was a real eye-opener."

Although Man Ray died in 1976 at the age of 86, Juliet, his last muse, whom he married in 1946 in Los Angeles, was still alive in the late 1980s and living in Paris. “She was a lovely old lady, who smoked ten packs of cigarettes a day, surrounded by a demanding and often self-serving entourage, when her brothers took over the management of Man Ray’s collection. But they quickly learned, to their detriment, that it was best not to send originals when they received a request for reproductions. I spent a month at Juliet’s place on Rue d’Assas, making the phototypes.” We all know Man Ray's greatest images, like "Noire et Blanche," "Le Violon d'Ingres," or "Les Larmes," but when you have the entire series before you, when you can see the whole creative process, how an idea, a drawing, was transformed into a photograph to arrive at a painting or an object, it's absolutely fabulous. Man Ray was a man who knew exactly what he wanted. This is evident in his solarizations, the effect of which is particularly difficult to master. He was a prodigious worker, leading a prolific artistic output in which photography was only one element, even though he was one of the first to use it as a distinct art form. Moreover, he always considered himself a painter. It was by chance that he came to photography, to make a living from it, having been introduced to the technique by Stieglitz. This allowed him to make reproductions of paintings by his Dadaist friends, and often, when he had a spare plate, he would create a portrait of the artist. That's how we have photos of a young Picasso.” This collaboration with the Man Ray Trust led to the co-production of a multimedia CD dedicated to the artist's work, and then to the creation of the first online digital photo library, complete with a search engine, dedicated to a single artist and designed to manage reproduction rights. It was on this basis that Pierre-Yves Butzbach pursued a veritable quest for Man Ray's originals, contacting collectors. Today, the collection of reproductions exceeds 10,000 negatives. “That's how I met Lucien Treillard, Man Ray's last personal secretary. He was very wary at first because he completely rejected the commercial exploitation of the work of the man who was more his friend than his employer.” He himself kept tons of treasures and had never even been able to bring himself to throw away the negatives of the commercial portraits that had been Man Ray's livelihood in his early days. Rather than destroy them, as he had asked him to, he donated them to the Centre Pompidou. Entire crates, of which only 15,000 negatives have been digitized so far… Little by little, a bond developed between the two men, based on their veneration of the master. “I think he considered me a bit like his spiritual son. So one day, he arrived at my house with 3,000 phototypes made by Man Ray himself and his assistants, a selection of what he truly wanted preserved from his work and how he wanted it disseminated. He gave them to me as a gift… but nothing gives me more joy today than rediscovering an unknown image.” In addition to Man Ray's digital photo library, Telimage, Pierre-Yves Butzbach's company, also created the Dubuffet Foundation's database, as well as Titouan Lamazou's e-commerce website. www.manray-photo.com allows users to view the collection and even order, from among 150 selected images, a reproduction on silver gelatin paper in sizes ranging from 24x30 to 50x60 cm. This was done with the collaboration of Lucien Treillard, Man Ray's personal secretary. https://www.estrepublicain.fr/est-magazine/2014/03/02/gardien-du-tresor-de-man-ray Fred JIMENEZ - March 2, 2014