The son of a Greek father and an Italian mother, Mario Prassinos lived in France from the age of six. He was seriously wounded in the Second World War and won the "Croix de Guerre". After the age of eighteen, Prassinos came into contact with Breton, Eluard and Aragon and gravitated towards Surrealism, an idiom that dominated his work most markedly between 1932 and 1936. His works are owned by a number of major European and American museums, including the Stedelijk Muiseum in Amsterdam, the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, and Museum of Modern Art, New York.