Theodoros Stamos (1922-1997)
Born in New York to parents of Greek heritage, his mother from Sparta and his father from Lefkada (the latter location featuring prominently as a place of inspiration for many of his later works). Theodoros Stamos is heralded as one of the few abstract painters who bridged the New York School’s first and second generations. He was the youngest member of the Irascibles - the core group of 15 New York School painters famously captured by Nina Leen’s 1951 photograph in Life magazine.
Stamos showed exceptional promise early in life. At the age of 13, he accepted a scholarship to the American Artists’ School in New York to study sculpture with Simon Kennedy and Joseph Konzal. He would later abandon sculpture in favor of painting, a medium in which he was largely self-taught.
At the American Artists School he met Joseph Solman, who was a member of the politically engaged group of artists called The Ten, whose ranks included Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko. Solman encouraged Stamos to both paint and visit galleries showing works by painters such as Milton Avery, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Paul Klee. His earliest paintings represented primitive Greek imagery and landscapes of the New Jersey Palisades.
Stamos was an active participant in the New York avant-garde during the early years of Abstract Expressionism. His work quickly garnered the attention of famed art dealer Betty Parsons, who organized Stamos' first solo exhibition at her Wakefield Gallery and Bookstore in 1943. Interest from museums and private collectors followed in short order, among them the Museum of Modern Art, Peggy Guggenheim, and Edward R. Root.
More commercial and critical success followed, and from 1943 to 1947, Stamos enjoyed three solo shows and participated in several important group exhibitions. These included the Whitney Museum’s annual, as well as the important early show of Abstract Expressionist painting The Ideographic Picture, which was curated by Barnett Newman at Betty Parsons' new and eponymous gallery. Stamos established lasting friendships with both Newman and Mark Rothko, who shared with the younger artist an interest in primitive and mythological imagery.
Following the conclusion of World War II, Stamos traveled extensively through the U.S. and Europe. While abroad, he spent time in France, Italy, and Greece, using his time in Paris to become acquainted with some of history's most renowned modernists Picasso, Brancusi, and Giacometti. Always sensitive to the particularities of light, mood, and color of specific locales, Stamos' paintings are indexes of his responses to different places. Later in his career, he devoted several series of paintings to sites from prior sojourns, including Jerusalem, Delphi, and Lefkada, an island in the Ionian Sea.
Stamos held numerous academic posts during his career. He taught at Hartley Settlement House in New York in the early 1950s, and at the progressive Black Mountain College outside of Asheville, NC, where he met the influential critic Clement Greenberg and had Kenneth Noland as one of his students. In 1955, he began teaching at the Art Students League in New York, a position he would hold for more than 20 years.
Through the 1970s and into the 80s, Stamos was embroiled with what would come to be known as the "Rothko Case," after serving as the executor of his close friend Mark Rothko's estate. Upon the conclusion of all legal proceedings - which lasted for more than a decade - Stamos emerged with his reputation all but destroyed. While he would never commercially recover or rehabilitate his legacy in the company of his much more acclaimed friends and colleagues, he nonetheless continued to paint and show through the last decade of his life, with ACA Galleries in New York and the Municipal Art Gallery in Thessaloniki, Greece honoring him with retrospective exhibitions.
After a prolonged illness, Theodoros Stamos died on February 2, 1997.
Stamos’ art appears in countless private and public collections in the U.S. and abroad, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; National Picture Gallery (Athens, Greece); San Francisco Art Institute Galleries; Tel Aviv Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Chrysler Art Museum (Norfolk, VA); the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.); and Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung, Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, (Munich, Germany).
Source: Hollis Taggart
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