10 Facts About Nicolas Calas

Nicolas Calas was the pseudonym of Nikos Kalamaris, a Greek-American poet and art critic.

Nicolas Calas studied Law and Political Science at the University of Athens between 1925 and 1930 and became active in the radical Student Society.

Nicolas Calas covered a wide range of subjects, such as cinema, politics and literary criticism, and he was the first critic to analyze the poetry of Constantine Cavafy from a Freudo-Marxist perspective.

Nicolas Calas's poetry, published under the pseudonym Nikitas Randos, went through several stylistic changes which reflected his artistic curiosity and interest in the modernist trends of the early 20th century, such as futurism, expressionism and surrealism.

One of the first true modernists in Greece, Nicolas Calas was clearly ahead of his time and suffered some negative criticism.

Nicolas Calas's debut was followed by four poetry "notebooks" which circulated hors de commerce between 1933 and 1936.

Nicolas Calas continued writing poems, now in French, which were highly influenced by his immersion in surrealist poetics.

Nicolas Calas 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 Time magazine.

Nicolas Calas arrived in New York as one of the first emigre 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, Village Voice, Arts Magazine and Artforum.

Nicolas Calas received three successive grants from the Bollingen Foundation to write a study of the triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch but failed to get it published and continued rewriting the manuscript until his death.