Mario Prassinos was a French artist of the Greek origin who worked in such fields as painting, printmaking, illustration, design and writing. He represented the School of Paris.
As a painter, he was known for his series of Turkish Landscapes.
Background
Mario Prassinos was born on July 30, 1916, in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire (currently Istanbul, Turkey) to a family of intellectuals and artists Lysandre and Victorine Prassinos.
When Mario was a six-year-old boy, his parents fled to France from the persecution of Greeks by the Ottoman government and settled down in Nanterre, a commune not far from Paris.
Mario Prassinos had an elder sister who later became a notable surrealist writer.
Education
Mario Prassinos studied at a French lycée on the language department. In 1932, he became a student of the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations. There, he produced his first surrealist paintings and got acquainted with such representatives of the style like Paul Eluard, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp.
Two years later, Prassinos pursued his studies at the Sorbonne. He also received some painting lessons from the painter Clement Serveau.
The first solo exhibition of Mario Prassinos took place in 1938 at the Pierre Vorms Gallery in Paris. The exposition was visited by Pablo Picasso.
Two years after his artistic debut, the painter became a volunteer for the World War II. During the military service, he was severely injured.
Later, Prassinos settled down in Paris, at Villa Seurat.
In 1942, Mario Prassinos met Raymond Queneau and became involved in the literary movement of the time. He started his collaboration with the publishing house N.R.F. and got acquainted with many famous personalities in this field, including Gaston Gallimard, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Lescure, and Gaston Bachelard. Since that time till 1950, Prassinos had illustrated with his etchings a lot of writings of various authors, many of which were done for the Editions Gallimard. Among the examples of such illustrations was a book titled L’Instant Fatal by Raymond Queneau (1946).
This time, Mario Prassinos tried his hand in a theatrical field – he produced in 1947 his first scenography for the stage director Jean Vilar at the National People's Theatre as well as at the Festival d'Avignon. The next year, he exhibited at the Billiet-Caputo Gallery. The painting series called Herds appeared.
At the beginning of the 1950s, Prassinos started to work in a house in Eygalieres in the Bouche-du-Rhone which he had bought because of the beauty of Les Baux and the Alpille. The artist depicted the mountains in his landscapes of this time.
Then, Prassinos met Jean Lurcat who pushed the artist to work with tapestry. The painter moved to Aubusson town near Paris where he created about 150 tapestry cartoons woven from 1951 till 1975. This period, came his next collaboration with the theatre – the artist designed costumes and stage for Macbeth, directed by Jean Vilar in Avignon and at the National People's Theatre in Paris.
In 1956, Prassinos presented his artworks for the first time at the Paris Galerie La Demeure and demonstrated his artworks there frequently since this time.
At the end of the decade, Prassinos travelled to Greece and started to use ink in his art. With ink and paint, he produced a lot of paintings in white and black colours. In 1958, some of them were demonstrated to the public at the solo show organized at the Blu Gallery in Milan.
There, in Italy, the artist returned to his design activity and created set and costumes for Erik XIV by Strindberg in 1960 and for Verdi's Macbetto by Verdi held at the Scala de Milano (1963). The last year of the decade, the artist did his next scenography – this time, for the ballet Eonta with a music by Iannis Xenakis. Despite, Passionos produced the series called Landscapes, Trees and Bouquets which later became a basis for his portraits, like these of Bessie Smith and his grand-father Prétextat. The artist held a couple of solo exhibitions, in particular, at the Picasso Museum in Antibes (1961) and at the Orangerie Verlag in Cologne the next year. He also demonstrated his works in Dutch museums, at the Kunsthalle in Basel and in Zurich (tapestries).
The next period of Mario Prassinos’s artistic journey was related to the writing activity. So, his first book titled Les Prétextats was published by Gallimard in 1973 and was followed by The Tattooed Hill ten years later. An author, Prassinos didn’t drop design and painting. The theatre projects of this time included the ballet Eonta by Xenakis (1969), the ballet Bolero at the Opera Comique (1970) and Cripure by Louis Guilloux (1975) for which he created the costumes and stage settings. In 1972, the artist exhibited at the Ateneo in Madrid and at the Galerie de France in Paris. The last year of 1970, Prassinos held an exposition at the French Institute in Athens.
During the last period of Mario Prassinos’s career, he continued his work as a stage designer. So, he designed the scenery and costumes for Le Sacre du Printemps ballet by Stravinsky (1980) and for the Verdi’s Otello (1981) staged at the Avignon and Marseille Operas. The artist had some huge retrospectives of his paintings, drawings, sculptures and etchings, in particular, in Aix-en-Provence curated by Presence Contemporaine (1982), Tapestry Museum in Aubusson, the Ecole Nationale d’Art Décoratif, the French Institute in Athens, Rhodes and Thessaloniki two years later. Three years before the artist’s death, was published his book dubbed The Tattooed Hill.
One of the last projects of Mario Prassinos became the Paintings of Torment for Notre-Dame de Pitié chapel in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
Quotations:
"I became interested in the art of tapestry particularly because I was excited by the numbered cartoon technique consisting of the fabrication of a mental coloured image using a code... Tapestry is an essential exercise. As I practised it, it is perhaps the desire to interrogate, down to the finest detail, a work which exists in two dimensions."
"There is, in fact, a story behind these landscapes … In these landscapes, there is always a tree or something resembling a tree or can be taken for a tree. This is a memory of childhood. The countryside around Constantinople is relatively flat and sprinkled with groups of isolated trees. I wanted to revisit the image of a horizon cut by a tree, a tree that stands against the light."
Connections
Mario Prassinos married Yolande Borelly in 1938. The couple had a daughter Catherine who was born in 1946.
The artist had a granddaughter Emmanuelle, born about 1967.