Étienne Bertrand Weill

From 1975 to 1986, he taught photography at Paris-Sorbonne University and was a member of the Plastic Arts Agregation jury.

With these Metaforms, described as “music for the eyes” by Maurice Fleuret, he will ‎later imagine and elaborate kinetic suites accompanied by music. Neither music or the Metaform are illustrative, but both aim at creating a world free from reality. They will be part of various scenographies, poetic recitals, concert, dance and mime shows, projected, among other places, at Le Musée d‏’‏art moderne de la Ville de Paris. in 1971 and 1976, Le theatre de la Ville de Paris (where in 1971 one of his suites is the prelude to Hymnen, by Karlheinz Stockhausen, choreographed by Le Ballet contemporain, in a scenography by Gérard Fromanger), and also projected at Opéra de Paris and in many international festivals around the world.

From the 1960s, with the Metaforms created, he becomes one of the masters of ‎abstract photography and takes his place in the kinetic art, one of the great trends of modern photography. He presents one of these early Metaforms in an exhibition organised by the Groupe Espace at Biot in 1957.

In 1948, Etienne Bertrand Weill marries Jacqueline Weill and five daughters will be born. From 1987 onwards, the couple lived in Jerusalem, where he continued to work until his death in 2001.

He joined the French Resistance in 1942, and used his drawing talents to forge identity papers in order to save children before enlisting in the maquis of the Éclaireurs ‎israélites de France. At the end of the war he joined the First army to fight in the Vosges and Alsace campaign. His mother was arrested in 1942 before being interned at Drancy internment camp and later deported to Sobibor extermination camp where she was killed in March 1943.

Étienne Bertrand Weill (1919-2001) was a French photographer. His primary works were abstract Metaforms.

Born in 1919 in Paris to an assimilated Jewish family, he is the son of Raphaël Weill and Jeanne Ullmann. He had an early interest in art, but decided to pursue photography because his older brother and two of his uncles, Louis Ullmann and Édouard Moyse (1827-1907), were already painters. He graduated from École nationale de Photographie et de cinéma Louis Lumière.