LENOX — Jonas Dovydenas, an acclaimed photographer, philantropist and longtime board member at The Mount, was killed Saturday in a two-car crash while visiting Lithuania, according to family members.
His wife, Elizabeth “Betsy” Dovydenas, and sister Liuda Dovydenas also were in the crash, but their injuries were less severe, according to the couple’s daughter, Elena Dovydenas Green. She said the family was in Lithuania for a literary festival in the city of Panevezys.
“They got into a horrible car accident … I don’t know all the details,” Green told The Eagle. “My father suffered traumatic injuries to his chest.”
She said her mother and aunt were in stable condition. The passengers in the second vehicle in the crash were not seriously injured, she said.
Jonas, whose father, Liudas Dovydenas, was an acclaimed author in Lithuania, established a book award in his father’s name and traveled there every year to bestow the prize.
An acclaimed photographer, Jonas gave countless hours to The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home, as a board of trustees member and chairman. He was also an active philanthropist, giving to cultural and conservation causes.
“He was an incredibly complex man,” Green said. “He was very powerful. He was a force of nature. He was very intense. He loved debating over ideas and it gave him so much pleasure to go back and forth with someone and power through all these different ideas.”
He also had a seriousness of purpose that drove his life, whether it was making 13 trips to Afghanistan between 1985 and 2010 to photograph people who had been through decades of war, or personally reading every finalist for the book award named after his father.
“I went on vacation with my parents in June and my father had 12 books he was powering through,” Green said. “He reads each one cover to cover.”
“He took everything seriously; he did not have a chill side,” Green added. “But my best memories of him are flying — we flew all over the country together. We had a little Falco airplane … like a sportscar in the sky. We flew everywhere.”
Her father built that plane in his garage, Green said.
Those flights, including a number of cross-country adventures, are among Green’s favorite memories of her father. “It was so beautiful and quiet up there … it was a way to be close to him and have a really fun time together.”
Jonas and Betsy, an artist, have also been known for their philanthropy to cultural institutions and conservation efforts, though a great deal of it has been given quietly and without fanfare.
“They just really wanted to give back,” Green said. “They were knitted into the fabric of their community.”
Many of those donations were small gifts to local churches to replace boilers and roofs, Green said. “Stuff that wasn’t very glamorous … they didn’t want a plaque. They didn’t want to be on a list of donors.”
Born in 1939 to Liudas and Elena Dovydenas, Jonas and his family escaped Soviet-occupied Lithuania in 1944 and spent five years in Germany before immigrating to the United States and settling in Scranton, Pa.
After graduating high school and serving in the U.S. Air Force, Jonas enrolled at Brown University, majoring in English and earning a degree in 1965. He had developed an interest in photography in the Air Force, and while at Brown, he took a photography class with Harry Callahan at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Jonas also studied at the Institute of Design of The Illinois Institute of Technology before joining the city of Chicago’s Department of Urban Renewal as a photographer in 1966.
Jonas published several books during his lifetime, and his work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Library of Congress, as well as private collections.
He leaves his wife, Betsy, his sister, Liuda, two children, John Dovydenas and Elena Green, and two granddaughters.
Jonas was asked about his photography in a 2022 interview with The Eagle about his book “Photos from an Endless War,” showcasing images he had taken over 13 trips to Afghanistan.
”Portraiture is an attempt to show something about a person,” he said. Photography has a way of capturing fleeting moments. You get a sense of someone by being there with them.”
Green said Jonas met her mother, the former Elizabeth Dayton, in Minneapolis in the 1970s, when she took a photography class he was teaching. They were married 47 years, she said.
“They were just really bonded; they were a total pair. There was no separating them,” she said. “They were more together than apart. Just a really tight unit and very loving, very caring.”
The family moved to Lenox from Chicago in the early 1980s, and Jonas joined the Edith Wharton Restoration’s board of trustees in 1983. He served through 2004, and was chair from 1984 to the late 1990s. He was also chairman for first lady Hilary Clinton’s visit to The Mount in July 1998 for her “Save America’s Treasures” tour.
The family went through difficult times in the 1980s, as plaintiffs in a lawsuit covered by the national media.
In the 1980s, Betsy joined The Bible Speaks, a Lenox ministry founded by Carl H. Stevens. During that time, Betsy, the heir to a significant family fortune, donated $6.5 million to The Bible Speaks and left her remaining inheritance to the ministry.
A family intervention pulled her out of the ministry — now referred to as a cult by many experts — and in 1986, the family sued Stevens and The Bible Speaks, seeking the return of the $6.5 million, citing Stevens “undue influence.” In 1987, a federal bankruptcy court ruled in the Dovydenas’ favor, though the award was reduced to $5.5 million on appeal.
In 2022, Betsy wrote and illustrated a book about the experience.
“I’m very fortunate that my family did what they did for me because I got a jump on understanding [what had happened to me],” she told The Eagle. “I hope that people who need to understand what happened to them find a way, that’s why I put the resources in the back. Because most people, when they get out, haven’t a clue what to do.”