Gisèle Prassinos

Biography

Many people know the 1934 photograph taken by Man Ray at the Café Dynamo: a girl reads her poems, and around her sit Breton, Éluard, Benjamin Péret and René Char. The girl was fourteen, and her name was Gisèle Prassinos.

She was born on 26 February 1920 in Constantinople, into a Greek family; by some accounts her mother was of Italian origin. Her father, Lysandros Prassinos, taught French literature and edited the Greek journal “Logos”. In 1922 the family left the city because of the war and the persecution of Greeks and settled in France, first in Puteaux and then in Nanterre. Her elder brother Mario became a well-known artist. Gisèle began writing automatic texts at fourteen. Her brother showed them to the Surrealists through a mutual acquaintance, Henri Parisot. Breton and Éluard saw in her a “woman-child” and welcomed her into their circle. Her first poems appeared in 1934 in the magazines “Minotaure” and “Documents 34”, and in 1935 the publisher GLM brought out “La Sauterelle arthritique” (“The Arthritic Grasshopper”), with a preface by Éluard and a photograph by Man Ray. Collections and tales followed: “Quand le bruit travaille” (1936), “La Lutte double” (1938), and “Le Feu maniaque”, to which Éluard contributed a preface and an afterword. In 1940 Breton included her texts in his “Anthology of Black Humour”.

She herself described those years differently from the usual account. She was taken to Place Blanche and shown off “like some curious little animal”, and once she was asked to write a short text on the spot so that everyone could be convinced. She said she was indifferent to Surrealism, but she quickly understood what was expected of her: unpredictability, fantasy, absurdity. I think this caveat is worth keeping in mind when reading any account of the “girl Surrealist”.

In 1946 Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” was published with her illustrations.

During the war and until the end of the 1950s she published almost nothing. She worked in nurseries and, with her husband Pierre Fridas, translated Nikos Kazantzakis into French, among other books “Freedom or Death” and “Zorba the Greek”. When she returned to writing, it was outside Surrealist orthodoxy: the novel “Le Temps n’est rien” (1958), then “La Confidente” (1962), “Le Visage effleuré de peine” (1964) and “Le Grand repas” (1966). Her collection of short stories “Le Cavalier” won a prize for the best short story in 1961. Her stories and novels are hard to place in a single genre; critics see in them a fairy-tale distortion of reality and the theme of human defencelessness. In 1967 the collection “Les Mots endormis” gathered poems and tales from her Surrealist period, and in 1976 came “Trouver sans chercher”, containing texts from 1934 to 1944. Her poetry of the 1970s and 1980s is partly addressed to children: “Le ciel et la terre se marient” (1979) and “L’instant qui va” (1985). Some of her children’s poems entered school anthologies in France. In 1975 she published “Brelin le Frou ou le portrait de famille”, a book of stories about characters who live by fantastic rules. She drew the illustrations herself, and on her caricatured figures, with their exaggerated proportions, the headdresses echo the shape of their sex. The humour of the stories in “Mon cœur les écoute” (1982) has been compared to that of Henri Michaux and Joyce Mansour.

As a visual artist Prassinos is known for her drawings and for “hangings”: appliqués made from small pieces of coloured felt, including some on biblical subjects. Her listed works include “Fish and Birds” (1936, pencil), “Birds and Other Monsters” (1936, pastel) and “Samson and Delilah” (1978, felt, 79 × 103 cm). In the 1990s and 2000s came the collections “La Lucarne” (1990), “La Table de famille” (1993) and “La Mort de Socrate et autres nouvelles” (2006).

She died on 15 November 2015 in Paris, at the age of ninety-five. She bequeathed a large collection of manuscripts to the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris, and her artworks to her niece, Catherine Prassinos.