Mario Prassinos was born in Constantinople in 1916 into a Greek family that had been living in the City for generations. His father, Lysandre, was a French language teacher at the French High School in Pera, the cosmopolitan district of Constantinople where the Prassinos family lived. Lysandre Prassinos was also editor-in-chief of the literary magazine O Logos (The Word). Mario's mother, Victorine Massimo, was of Italian descent, she had two sisters. Their mother Anastasie was the companion of Charles-PRÉTEXTAT Leconte, who has been an inspiration for many of the artist’s paintings to come. Mario's sister Gisèle was born in 1920. The Prassinos family had to leave Turkey in 1922, shortly after Mustapha Kemal's victory. The Turkish landscapes and the Alpilles series, where the Arabic calligraphy he had seen as a child, in Saint Sophia and on Turkish coins, would later emerge from this brutal estrangement from his country of origin.
The family settled in Nanterre where Victorine died in 1927 and stayed on until the death in 1936 of Lysandre, the central figure in Mario and Gisèle's lives. It was thanks to his support that the two children developed their artistic gifts and creative imagination.
In  1937 Mario entered the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. He became friends with André Bay, Jacques Chardonne's son-in-law and director of the Stock editions, for which he illustrated many books. In their house in La-Frette-sur-Seine he met Henri Parisot, a young publisher close to the Surrealists, who was to become his artistic and literary agent, as well as that of his sister.
From 1934 to 1939 Mario and Gisèle lived the surrealist experience and Gisèle's first text La sauterelle arthritique was published by Guy Levis Mano. Mario began studying literature in 1934 and then enrolled in modern Greek at the School of Oriental languages in Paris. In 1936 he decided to devote himself to painting. In 1938 he had his first solo exhibition at the Billiet-Vorms gallery in Paris.
After Lysandre's death, the Prassinos family moved to rue Bérite in Paris near Montparnasse. The poet Max Jacob, who lived down the street, supported them through their ordeal. That same year Mario illustrated Max Jacob’s Chemin de croix infernal, published by G.L.M. In 1938 Mario married and moved to the rue Daguerre in Paris. In 1939, Mario joined the Foreign Volunteers Marching Regiment in Barcarès (Pyrénées-orientales). In 1940 he was seriously wounded in combat and demobilised. Shortly after his return to Paris, the couple left their flat in rue Daguerre and moved to 18 villa Seurat, a dead-end in the 14th district where many artists have lived to this day.
Mario Prassinos took up engraving in 1937. Between then and 1985 he produced around a hundred engravings and thirty silk-screen prints, as well as numerous engraved illustrations for 23 books. For the  Gallimard editions, he produced 205 bindings for the famous Bonet-Prassinos hardback collection. While at Gallimard, he made friends with many writers, notably Raymond Queneau, for whom he illustrated L'instant fatal with engravings in 1946.
In 1946, he met Boris Vian, despite their two aborted projects, a ballet and a film, they were to remain friends until Boris's early death in 1959. Birth of his daughter Catherine.
The painter Alberto Magnelli lived at 20 villa Seurat. Mario, 28 years his junior, developed a close friendship with him. Magnelli was a strong influence from 1947 until 1949, when he became a naturalised French citizen. In 1947, Jean Vilar, who was trying to set up a theatre festival in Avignon, asked him to design the sets and costumes for Tobie et Sara by Paul Claudel. In 1954 he also designed for Jean Vilar’s National Popular Theatre the sets for Macbeth by William Shakespeare and in 1960 for Erik XIV by August Strindberg.
In 1948 he joined La Galerie de France, where he exhibited his works regularly until 1976.
In 1949, he exhibited his engravings at the La Hune bookshop-gallery in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and in 1953 at the same venue, his recent engravings for E.A. Poe's The Raven.
In the early 50s, it was in the Dordogne, where he met up again with the gallery owner and publisher Pierre Vorms, that he broke with abstraction and worked on a series of paintings on canvas and paper entitled "Les troupeaux" (The Herds) and engraved the wood and copper plates for E.A. Poe's The Raven.
He moved to Eygalières in 1951 thanks to a bibliophile friend of Pierre Vorms who, after an enthusiastic visit, found him a house that he bought. There he made his first tapestry cartoon for Suzanne Goubely-Gatien's workshops in Aubusson. This is where all his cartoons were woven, 178 in all, with the exception of the ten or so tapestry cartoons woven by the Mobilier National in Paris (les Gobelins) or Beauvais.
It was in Eygalières, seduced by the arid landscape and the sharp light that vibrates on the black and white colours of the Alpilles, that he drew daily for 20 years.
The La Demeure Gallery, located initially on rue Cambacérès and then on place Saint-Sulpice, exhibited all his tapestries from 1956 until 1975.
1958 was the year of his enthusiastic discovery of Greece. After a month's cruise around the Aegean islands, he rented a house on the island of Spetsai. There he made daily drawings of the cypress trees near his house, which became “Les Cyprès de Spetsai” (the cypresses of Spetses), oil paintings and ink drawings on paper that he brought back to France where, in 1959, he painted one of his major canvases, Meltem.
The sixties were a very productive decade, with a solo exhibition in Antibes at the Château Grimaldi, the future Picasso Museum, his collaboration in Zurich with the tapestry dealer Colette Ryter, and the costumes and sets  for Giuseppe Verdi's Macbetto at La Scala in Milan, directed by Jean Vilar.
The first Salon de Mai was held in 1945 and he exhibited there a painting every year until 1986. For the 1963 Salon, he painted Les Poseuses (oil on canvas, 200 x 248 cm) after Georges Seurat, for whom he had a great admiration. This work entered the collections of the Musée Picasso in Antibes in 1988. Starting in 1962 he took part in six tapestry biennials in Lausanne. During the first four events, he exhibited several large-format tapestries on the theme of Shakespearean characters.
This was followed by a series of portraits of the singer Bessie Smith, the “Prétextats” (after his grandfather) – his book “Les Prétextats” was published by Gallimard in 1973 –, the “Pèretextats” (after his father), the “Proprotextats” (after his dog), the “Père-éternels” and the ”Suaires” (Shrouds).
From 1967 to 1969 he was commissioned by the Manufacture Nationale de Céramique de Sèvres to decorate bowls and vases.
In 1961, he was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, in 1966 a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, and in 1980 an Officier des Arts et des Lettres.
During the 1960s, Mario Prassinos carried out several decorative commissions under the per cent for art scheme. It was also during this decade that he painted his first large-format canvases series, “Paysages turcs” (Turkish landscapes), forests in which the viewer’s eyes are lost. These works were the main theme of his exhibition at the Galerie de France in Paris in 1976 and at the Galerie Nationale du Grand Palais in Paris in 1980. At this time he began working in oils on paper on the theme of “Trees”. 
In 1973 and 1974, at the request of the painter Balthus, who was director of the Académie de France in Rome, he became a member of the admissions committee.
During these years he continued to work for the theatre and the ballet. He began writing his autobiographical novel La colline tatouée (The tattooed hill), published by Grasset in 1983.
He decided to donate some of his works to the French state. The collection comprises 108 works dating from 1958 to 1985, including paintings, drawings, tapestries, prints and screen prints. This collection was displayed in the Donation Mario Prassinos museum in Saint-Rémy de Provence until 2012.
Mario Prassinos died in Avignon in October 1985. He is buried in Eygalières.

Catherine Prassinos © ADAGP Paris, 2024