Antoine Mayo

Antoine Malliarakis, known as Mayo, was born on February 15, 1905 in Port Said, Egypt, to a Greek father who was an engineer for the Suez Canal Company and a French mother. A Greek painter naturalized as French, Mayo moved to France in 1914 and studied architecture in Paris, gaining admission to the École des Beaux-Arts in 1924. He frequented Parisian avant-garde circles and attended Surrealist meetings from 1924, where he met André Breton, Max Ernst, René Magritte, and Yves Tanguy. Although introduced to the Surrealist movement by René Crevel in 1927, Mayo showed no interest in participating in a collaborative movement. In 1929 he exhibited alongside De Chirico at the Galerie des Quatre Chemins and contributed to the magazine Le Grand Jeu. During the 1930s and 1940s, like many Surrealists, he was inspired by the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War in his compositions, while also experimenting with printmaking at S.W. Hayter's Atelier 17 in Paris.

In 1944, his friend writer Jacques Prévert recommended him as costume designer for the masterpiece film Les Enfants du Paradis. The film's success enabled Mayo to pursue a twenty-year career in French cinema, designing costumes and scenery for numerous classics, including Casque d'or and Hiroshima mon amour. During this period he also worked as art director on many commercials. Between 1933 and 1934, and again between 1937 and 1941, Mayo traveled to Egypt, where he contributed to the development of the Groupe Art et Liberté, founded in 1938 in Cairo by Egyptian poet Georges Henein. This radical collective of artists and writers represented a distinct yet underrepresented chapter in the history of Surrealism, as highlighted by the recent exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders organized by Tate Modern and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

With the advent of the Nouvelle Vague in the early 1960s, period pieces became less frequent and Mayo received fewer work offers. He ultimately decided to leave cinema to concentrate on painting. In 1966 he moved his soon-to-be demolished Paris studio to Rome at Via Magutta, where he began a new body of work. During this period, known as the Période Romaine, Mayo painted historic ruins from antiquity, exploring the communion between the human figure and nature through masterful and bold use of color, drawing inspiration from Ovid's Metamorphoses. In 1983 the Centre Culturel Français de Rome organized a retrospective of his work, including the recent images of historic ruins. In 1985 Mayo returned to France, where he received the Grade of Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Unfortunately, in the early 1980s, Mayo gradually lost his eyesight. He died in Seine-Port in 1990, leaving behind a multifaceted artistic legacy encompassing painting, decoration, costume design, design, and illustration.