Nicolas Calas
This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. (November 2009) |
Nicolas Calas (Nikos Kalamaris) | |
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Born | May 27, 1907 Greek-American |
Period | 1932–1985 |
Genre | Surrealism, Modernism, Art criticism |
Nicolas Calas (
Biography
Nicolas Calas was born Nikos Kalamaris in Lausanne, Switzerland, May 27, 1907, but grew up in Athens, the only son of Ioannis Kalamaris who descended from a family of ship-owners and landowners from the island Syros, and Rosa Caradja who was the great-granddaughter of Markos Botsaris, the military leader and hero of the Greek War of Independence, and a descendant from the Phanariot Caradja family, a noble family which supplied high officials to the Ottoman Empire and rotating rulers to Danubian principalities. Calas later rebelled against his wealthy family background by becoming a
Greece
Calas studied Law and Political Science at the University of Athens between 1925 and 1930 and became active in the radical Student Society. Although he worked in a law office between 1930 and 1934, he soon abandoned this career to concentrate on his writing, both poetry and literary and political critique, often highly polemical in both style and content. Calas's critical work, mostly published under the pseudonym M. Spieros (influenced by the French revolutionary
France
Between 1934 and 1937, Calas split his time between Athens and Paris, where he soon became a member of the surrealist group attached to André Breton. The politically repressive climate in Greece after the 1936 coup of the dictator General Metaxas necessitated his permanent abandonment of Greece and he thus settled permanently in Paris in 1937. He continued writing poems, now in French, which were highly influenced by his immersion in surrealist poetics. Unpublished at the time, Calas's French poems finally appeared in a bilingual edition (French-Greek) in 2002 in Greece.
In 1938, Calas published a book of Freudo–Surrealist–Trotskyist criticism in French, Foyers d’incendie (Hearths of Arson) which revealed his influence by theoreticians of the Frankfurt School, especially Wilhelm Reich, as well as the manifesto "Towards a Free Revolutionary Art" formulated by Leon Trotsky, Diego Rivera and André Breton in Mexico in 1938.
Portugal
Forced to leave France at the eruption of World War II, Calas reached Lisbon in October 1939 where he waited for an opportunity to get on a boat to USA. During the few months he stayed in the Portuguese capital, he studied the baroque architecture of the city apart from trying to form a group of surrealists. He was finally able to leave Europe behind in the beginning of 1940 after receiving a visa through the help of his friend Sherry Mangan, an American Trotskyist poet and journalist working for
New York
Calas arrived in New York as one of the first émigré surrealists in 1940 and ended up living there until his death in 1988, working mainly as an art critic for several leading art journals, such as View,
Greek comeback
After spending some time in Greece during the 1950s, sorting out the family affairs after the death of his father, Calas began to write poems again in Greek in a cryptic and satirical style. These poems were first published in the avant-garde journal Pali (Πάλι) in the 1960s. This led to a comeback in Greece where he had previously been ignored or neglected as a poet. His old poems were republished together with his new poetry in the two collections Nikitas Randos Street (Οδός Νικήτα Ράντου), which won the State Prize for poetry in 1977, and Scripture and Light (Γραφή και φως) in 1983. Interest in his writings has been steadily increasing in Greece and he is now acknowledged as a groundbreaking poet and an important representative of modernism and a forerunner to Greek surrealism. After the death of Nicolas Calas in 1988 and his wife Elena Calas one year later, their art collection was inherited by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark. The Nicolas and Elena Calas Archives are located at the Nordic Library in Athens.
Works
Poetry
- Poems (Ποιήματα, 1932)
- Notebook I (Τετράδιο Α’, 1933)
- Notebook II (Τετράδιο Β’, 1933)
- Notebook III (Τετράδιο Γ’, 1934)
- Notebook IV (Τετράδιο Δ’, 1936)
- Nikitas Randos Street (Οδός Νικήτα Ράντου, 1977. ISBN 960-7721-24-1
- Scripture and Light (Γραφή και φως, 1983). ISBN 960-7721-34-9
- Sixteen French Poems and Correspondence with William Carlos Williams (Δεκαέξι γαλλικά ποιήματα και αλληλογραφία με τον Ουίλλιαμ Κάρλος Ουίλλιαμς, ed. Spilios Argyropoulos and Vassiliki Kolocotroni, 2002). ISBN 960-17-0084-6
- Oedipus is Innocent (Selected poems edited and translated by Lena Hoff, 2020). ISBN 9781916139275
Prose, essays, letters
- Hearths of Arson (French: Foyers d’incendie, 1938)
- Confound the Wise (1942)
- Primitive Heritage (co-edited with Margaret Mead, 1953)
- The Peggy Guggenheim Collection of Modern Art (co-written with Elena Calas, 1967)
- Art in the Age of Risk (1968)
- Icons and Images of the Sixties (co-written with Elena Calas, 1971)
- Surrealism Pro & Con (1973)
- Essays on Poetry and Aesthetics (Greek: Κείμενα ποιητικής και αισθητικής, ed. Alex. Argyriou, 1982). ISBN 0-8357-1690-2
- Transfigurations (1985)
- Yorgos Theotokas and Nicolas Calas. A Correspondence (Greek: Γιώργος Θεοτοκάς και Νικόλας Κάλας. Μια αλληλογραφία, ed. Ioanna Konstantoulaki-Hantzou, 1989)
- Nicolas Calas – Michalis Raptis. A Political Correspondence (Greek: Νικόλας Κάλας – Μιχάλης Ράπτης. Μια πολιτική αλληλογραφία, ed. Lena Hoff, 2002). ISBN 978-960-325-451-5
- Nicolas Calas – André Breton: lettres sur Hitler et l'impuissance de la littérature, in: Mélusine (Cahiers du Centre de Recherche sur le Surréalisme) XXXI: 231-252 (ed. Dimitri Kravvaris, 2011). ISBN 978-2-8251-4128-1
Notes
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved February 2, 2024.
References
- Christopher MacGowan (1996), "Sparkles of Understanding: Williams and Nicolas Calas", William Carlos Williams Review, 22:1 (Spring), 81–98.
- Panayiotis Bosnakis (1998), "Nicolas Calas's Poetry and the Critique of Greekness", Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, 24:2, 25–40.
- Roderick Beaton (1999), An Introduction to Modern Greek Literature, Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-815859-9
- Lena Hoff (2001), The Nicolas and Elena Calas Archive Catalogue, Athens: The Danish Institute at Athens. ISBN 87-7934-002-4
- Dickran Tashjian (2001), A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde 1920–1950, New York: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-28285-4
- Lena Hoff (2002), "A Surrealist Controversy – The Ideological Conflicts between Nicolas Calas and André Breton during World War II", Scandinavian Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 1, 20–29. ISSN 1651-1492
- Lena Hoff (2003), "Resistance in Exile – A Study of the Political Correspondence between Nicolas Calas and Michalis Raptis ([Michel Pablo]) 1967–72", Scandinavian Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 2, 17-41. ISSN 1651-1492
- Lena Hoff (2008), "The Critical Poetry of Nicolas Calas: Challenging the Poetics of Greekness", Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 32:1, 104–121. ISSN 0307-0131
- Nikos Stabakis (ed. + transl.) (2008), Surrealism in Greece: An Anthology, University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0-292-71800-5
- Lena Hoff (2009), "The Return of Nikitas Randos: Satire, Memory and Otherness in the Post-War Poetry of Nicolas Calas", pp. 229–240 in Greek Diaspora and Migration Since 1700, Surrey: Ashgate, ed. Dimitris Tziovas. ISBN 978-0-7546-6609-7
- Lena Hoff (2014), Nicolas Calas and the Challenge of Surrealism, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. ISBN 978-87-635-4068-1