Louis Teyssandier

Louis Teyssandier (Paris, April 27, 1909 - Talence, May 21, 1987), son of a Bordeaux typographer living in Paris was born in Vincennes on April 27, 1909. His family made him aware of the art of the book, which gave him the taste of beautiful illustrations. At the age of eleven, his parents gave him his first box of oil paints and at the same time, he discovered the Louvre museum and its profusion of works, and in particular Veronese's Les Noces de Cana, whose the multiple perspectives subjugate him.

He entered as a teenager at the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris in the theater decoration workshop headed by the famous Émile Bertin, president of the Union of master theater decorators. It was there that he met Guitry, Jouvet, Diaghilev and participated in the realization of sets for Matisse and Picasso.

Every year during the school holidays, he meets in Bordeaux his cousin Jean Lagenie who writes plays for which he already designs and creates the costumes and sets.

There followed a period of his life during which, as a stowaway, he left Le Havre on a freighter bound for the United States, in search of somewhere else. He will pay for his trip by greasing the lamps and the connecting rods, but being a minor he will be obliged to return to France.

After his military service in Colmar, and still in love with distant horizons, he enlisted in the army. Assigned to the geographic service, he stayed in Indochina and traveled to Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos where he discovered the wisdom of Buddhist monks and the philosophies of the Far East which influenced his work as a painter. He returned to Bordeaux in 1933 and found his cousin Jean Lagenie who had just founded the “Compagnie du Bon Vouloir” whose avowed goal was to shake up the traditions of “inert and easy” shows and prove that the theater was something quite different.

From 1935 to 1939, began in Bordeaux his activity as a theater designer for the “Compagnie du Bon Vouloir”. During the winter of 1936-1937, he produced the interior sets by Maeterlinck, L'Amour Médecin by Molière, La Double Inconstance by Marivaux, Orphée by Cocteau and Intermezzo by Giraudoux. From 1938, his activity widened and he produced, in collaboration with two other groups of the same obedience (“L'Avant-Scène” and the “Flamme”), the sketches of the costumes of the actors playing in Goldoni's La Locandiera. , The Magic Vase by Georges Salles and The Night of the Kings by Shakespeare.

Louis Teyssandier, mobilized during the war, was seriously injured in 1941 by shrapnel which perforated his lung. He returned to Bordeaux and married on August 14, 1941.