Alpille rouge, 1978

Mario Prassinos  

Mario Prassinos (July 30, 1916 - October 23, 1985) is a French non-figurative painter of Greek origin from the new School of Paris. Mario Prassinos was born in 1916, July 30 according to the Greek Orthodox calendar or August 12 according to the Gregorian calendar, into a Greek family established for many generations in Constantinople. In 1922, the Greeks in Turkey left the country to flee persecution and his family moved to France. Mario Prassinos attended the Puteaux school and then lived in Nanterre (until 1936). He continued his studies at the Lycée Condorcet and the School of Oriental Languages. He goes backstage at the Théâtre de l'Atelier (Charles Dullin), which gives him a taste for theater. In 1934, his sister Gisèle Prassinos, born in 1920, wrote her first texts for the magazine "Minotaure". He then met, at Man Ray's, the surrealist poets, André Breton, Paul Éluard, René Char and Benjamin Péret, then the painters Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Hans Arp and Marcel Duchamp. He made some drawings and frontispieces for the publisher Guy Lévis-Mano. Mario Prassinos created his first costumes in 1947 for a play by Paul Claudel produced by Jean Vilar (first Avignon Festival). He binds with the painter Alberto Magnelli and meets Myriam Prévot, future director with Gildo Caputo of the Galerie de France where he exhibits regularly thereafter. In 1949 he received French naturalization. His series of Herds makes him approach a less figurative painting. From 1951 he produced his first tapestries, exhibited in 1956 by the Galerie La abode, and sets and costumes for Macbeth, which Vilar produced in Avignon and, in Paris, at the TNP. In 1958, after a cruise with Albert Camus and Michel Gallimard, he made a long stay in the island of Spetses, Greece, which was the source of a renewal of his painting. Max-Pol Fouchet devotes a television film to him. From 1959 to 1964, Prassinos continued to create sets and costumes for Jean Vilar. New themes subsequently appeared in his painting: portraits of Bessie Smith (1962-1964) or of her grandfather Prétextat (1963-1970), new drawings after the Alpilles (1952-1977), hills that face at his house in Eygalières, the Shrouds (1974-1975), inspired by the Shroud of Turin, the Turkish Landscapes (1969-1981), exhibited at the Grand-Palais in Paris in 1980 and the Trees (1980-1985). Lucien Clergue made a film in 1969 on his work (text by Jean Lescure). Mario Prassinos wrote Les Prétextats, a reflection on the Prétextats series, then, from 1976, in the form of an autobiography, La Colline tatouée. In 1985, Prassinos worked on the eleven Paintings of Torment that he painted to decorate the Notre-Dame de Pitié chapel in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence1. This is where the donation of 108 works he made to the French State in 1985 is exhibited. Mario Prassinos died in Avignon on October 23, 1985.