Étienne Sved

Étienne Sved (1914-1996) was Hungarian-born French naturalised photographer and poster artist.

Étienne Sved was born Süsz István in Székesfehérvar, Hungary, in 1914, changing his name on June 9, 1947. In 1930 he joined Atelier Budapest, a school of graphic arts founded in Budapest by Bauhaus teachers fleeing Nazi Germany. A Jew, Étienne Sved, fled to Egypt in 1938, traveling the country on a donkey, touring ancient funerary sites on the banks of the Nile, eventually befriending Abbot Drioton, director of the Cairo Museum.

Life and work in Egypt

Sved remained in the country until 1946 and through his friendship with the writer and intellectual Georges Henein, founder of the surrealist Jama’at al-Fann Wa al-Hurriyyah (Art and Liberty Group) active 1939 - 1945, Sved worked as a photographer at the French paper Le Progrés Egyplien.  In 1945, when Sved executed a series of posters for a local brand of cigarettes called Setos, Henein was the director of Gianaclis, the company that owned it.

He published many satirical drawings before discovering photography, and while in Cairo, Sved created a series of anti-Nazi caricatures that were republished many years later in a bound volume titled Adolf ou à quand le crèpuscule des odieux?  His photographic work illustrated Jean Cocteau's Maalesh, a journal inspired by Cocteau's 1949 stay in Egypt.

Sved’s eagerness to document the local Arab and Bedouin populations, rather than the French colonialists, led him to create an impressive collection of images of artefacts and street photographs of great historical value, which appear notably in a work published in 1954,  Egypt face to face, with a text by Tristan Tzara.

In France

Étienne Sved departed Egypt for France in 1946, and the following year married. He became a naturalised French citizen in 1949. He continued his photographic career while successfully pursuing a career as an advertising graphic designer. In 1952, he travelled to Algiers to produce, over a six-week stay, 600 illustrations for the album Algiers, 1951, a country in waiting with texts by Benjamin Stora, and two Algerian writers, Malek Alloula and Maïssa Bey.

In 1962, he set up a publishing house and moved to Haute Provence producing Provence des campaniles (1972), which won the Nadar prize in 1990. He continued his work as a publisher and photographer until his death in 1996.

Legacy

In 2003, the Nicéphore-Niépce museum acquired the Middle Eastern photographic collection of Étienne Sved, comprising more than 3,000 negatives and  vintage prints) and mounted a major retrospective in the same year in Manosque. The following year, Denon museum in Chalon-sur-Saône showed Moolesh, seventy-five photographs taken during his early years in Egypt along with memorabilia including a self-portrait of Sved around 1940 in costume and tie; his 1944 press card for Le Progrés Egyplien; and the Hungarian civil status certificate recording his name change from Istvan Süsz on June 9, 1947.

Publications

Art égyptien (1950) Text by Étienne Drioton (1889-1961), photographs by Étienne Sved.

Étienne Sved: East meets West (1943)  Cairo: R. Schnindler.

Étienne Sved, Tristan Tzara (1896-1963c) L'Égypte face à face (Egypt face to face), 2nd ed.  Pierrevert : Sved 1988

Nice in full light (1976) editions: Saint Michel-l'Observatoire /  Paris: Sved, 1972

Étienne Sved, Malek Alloula (1937-2015) , Maïssa Bey , Benjamin Stora Alger 1951: un pays dans l'attente (Alger 1951: a country in waiting) Algiers: Barzakh, Barbentane : Équinoxe , 1996.

Étienne Sved, Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) Maalesh. Manosque: Bec up ed. ; [Chalon-sur-Saône]: Nicephore Niepce Museum, 2003

Website: http://www.sved.free.fr was created in May 2002 by the association "The Friends of Étienne Sved" for the conservation, the promotion and the diffusion of the artist’s work.