Greek-born French painter and tapestry designer, born on 30 July 1916 in Constantinople, died on 23 October 1985.
Life
From a Greek family of Constantinople, Mario Prassinos came to France in 1922, after the expulsion of the Greeks from Turkey, with his parents and his sister Gisèle, the future writer. He studied at the Lycée Condorcet, the École des langues orientales and then the Faculty of Letters in Paris, rather than the Beaux-Arts; he spent a brief period in the studio of the painter Clément Serveau.
It was through Gisèle Prassinos, whose poems appeared in reviews from 1934, notably Minotaure, that he came close to the Surrealists. He attended the meetings at the café on place Blanche and met Paul Éluard, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp. He painted in a Surrealist vein from 1932 to 1936 (La Bataille de Fontenoy, 1937; Guerrier grenouille, 1938) and first exhibited in 1938, at the Galerie Billiet-Pierre Vorms.
A volunteer in 1940, seriously wounded, he received the Croix de guerre, then helped Allied soldiers leave occupied France. He became friends with Raymond Queneau, who introduced him at Gallimard, and with Albert Camus. Naturalised French in 1949, in 1951 he settled in Eygalières, in the Alpilles.
The work
From 1949 Prassinos also devoted himself to tapestry (Les Troupeaux, 1949); his first pieces, shown at a reception at Gallimard, made his name. He worked for the stage, notably the sets for the Macbeth staged by Jean Vilar in Avignon in 1954.
A non-figurative painter at the end of the 1950s (Meltem, 1959, oil on canvas, 260 x 190 cm), he also made portraits (Bessie Smith, his grandfather Prétextat) and landscapes of the Alpilles, such as the series of inks Colline à Eygalières (1976).
Exhibitions and collections
- Mario Prassinos donation to the State, shown since 1986 in the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Pitié in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
- Works in the collections of the Musée national d’art moderne (Paris), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Kunsthalle Bremen, the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), and the Art Institute of Chicago.
- Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur (1966), Officier des Arts et des Lettres (1980).