Theodoros Stamos

Biography

In 1946 the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought Theodoros Stamos’s painting “Sounds in the Rock”. The artist was twenty-three, and among the future Abstract Expressionists he was the youngest.

He was born on 31 December 1922 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His mother came from Sparta, his father was raised on the island of Lefkada.

As a teenager Stamos won a scholarship to the American Artists School and studied sculpture there with Simon Kennedy and Joseph Konzal. His mentor was the teacher Joseph Solman, a member of the group The Ten: on his advice Stamos went to Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery An American Place and saw the work of Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe. He taught himself to paint and from 1939 devoted himself almost entirely to painting. In those years he earned a living however he could, working as a printer, a florist, a hat-blocker and a book salesman. At one of these jobs, in a frame shop on East 18th Street, he met European avant-garde artists, among them Arshile Gorky and Fernand Léger. His first solo exhibition, in 1943, was arranged by Betty Parsons at the Wakefield Gallery; Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman supported the proposal. Stamos showed regularly with Parsons until 1957. From 1945 to 1951 the Whitney Museum showed his work, in 1947 he took part in the exhibition “The Ideographic Picture”, organised by Newman, and in 1948 his work was at the Museum of Modern Art. Edward Wales Root began buying his paintings in 1945 and bought many of them. The work of the 1940s combines muted, earthy colours with biomorphic imagery resembling geological forms or embryonic organisms. Newman, in his text for the 1947 exhibition, wrote that Stamos’s ideographs have a “totemic affinity with the rock and the mushroom, the crayfish and the seaweed”.

Around 1950 Stamos joined the group known as the Irascibles: abstract painters who protested against the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s policy toward American painting and in 1950 posed for a famous photograph in Life magazine. At about the same time came the Tea House series, with soft geometric forms, a limited palette and dark calligraphic brushstrokes laid over them. Later in the 1950s his compositions grew simpler: he applied thin layers of paint to give depth to broad planes of colour. From 1950 to 1954 he taught at Black Mountain College, and from 1955 to 1975 at the Art Students League of New York and at the Cummington School of Fine Arts. In 1958–1959 his work travelled with the exhibition “The New American Painting”, and in 1959 it was shown at documenta II in Kassel.

He travelled a great deal: in 1947 by train to the American Southwest and the Pacific Northwest, in 1948–1949 through Europe, including Paris and Greece, and then for four more decades, including to Egypt and Russia. From 1962 he painted long series. The Sun-Boxes suggest the sun enclosed in rectangular areas. After 1971 he concentrated on the Infinity Fields. The late works, in reds and yellows, are described as tied to personally experienced states of mind and to the landscape of Lefkada, where he spent part of each year from 1970.

Mark Rothko named Stamos among his executors, although Stamos was not a lawyer. After Rothko’s suicide in 1970, the painter’s daughter sued the executors and the Marlborough Gallery. The case dragged on for about twelve years; the executors were found liable and ordered to pay more than nine million dollars. Stamos paid his share by signing his house over to the Rothko estate, with the right to live there for life. His reputation suffered from the affair, and many galleries stopped working with him. To my mind, reducing his later years to the scandal is still a mistake: the series of the 1960s and 1970s were painted precisely then.

A year before his death he gave forty-three of his works to the National Gallery of Greece. Stamos died on 2 February 1997 in Ioannina and is buried on Lefkada.