Mario Prassinos

The sitter in the present work is almost certainly Lysandre Prassinos, the father of Mario Prassinos, who was a professor of French literature in Istanbul. 

The bizarre forms of the twisted roofs of quaint buildings, a figure impaled on a church spire and gnarled tree branches add a potent background to this early grotesque portrait. L'homme à la carotte shows the expressive work of Prassinos while part of the Parisian Surrealist circle in the mid-1930s.

Parisian Surrealism developed out of the Dada movement that had been inspired, if not spawned, by World War I. Prassinos' mark on the Surrealist movement was itself born from the anxieties and conflict of the period leading up to WWII, and Prassinos stated in his Prétextats: 'The first warriors, clowns or dancers were monsters generally envisioned with lozenge-shaped heads. (A shape which for me, mysteriously, resembled the anguish of that time. I found it in the declaration of war on all of the house windows...)' (quoted in Catherine Prassinos, Mario Prassinos, Paris, 2005, p. 27). L'homme à la carotte expresses the seeming lack of reason present in a world that would be torn apart by impending war, as well as the responsive psyche and unique vision of a sensitive and precocious young artist.