Theodoros Stamos
Theodoros Stamos
1922 - 1997
American painter and illustrator. Born of Greek immigrant parents, he was awarded a scholarship to the American Artists’ School in New York, where he studied sculpture under Simon Kennedy and Joseph Konzal (b 1905). Abandoning sculpture, he began to devote himself to painting in 1939, a medium in which he was entirely self-taught. In 1941 he opened a framing shop in New York, which he ran until 1948. There he met Gorky and Léger and also framed several pictures by Klee for the Nierendorf Gallery. He had his first one-man show in 1943 at Betty Parsons’s Wakefield Gallery in New York. That year he also met Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman and in 1947 Rothko, Kurt Seligmann and Mark Tobey. His paintings of the 1940s drew on a variety of sources including mythology, natural forms and Oriental calligraphy and were executed in a rough textural manner. Legend of Dwelling (1947; New York, Whitney), for example, was animated by mysterious organic forms set in a primordial background.
In 1948 Stamos travelled to France, Italy and Greece with the poet Robert Price and through Christian Zervos met Brancusi, Victor Brauner, Giacometti, Henri Laurens and Picasso. He took up a teaching post in 1950 at Hartley Settlement House, where he taught for four years, and the same year he taught at Black Mountain College, NC, where he met Clement Greenberg and had Kenneth Noland as one of his students. From 1949 to 1952 he worked on the Teahouse series of paintings, which showed a flattening of space and simplification of form in his work, as in Teahouse, Berkshires (1949–51; artist’s col., see 1984 exh. cat., pl. 18). In 1950 he was the youngest of the 15 founder-members of The Irascibles, which included such Abstract Expressionists as Jackson Pollock, de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Newman, Rothko and others. In 1951 he illustrated John Malcolm Brinnin’s book The Sorrows of Cold Stone: Poems 1940–1950 (New York, 1951). In his important lecture ‘Why Nature in Art?’, delivered at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC (1954), Stamos expounded his aesthetic and discussed Oriental art, which greatly interested him. From 1954 to 1961 he worked on the Field series of paintings, which used large, flat areas of few colours applied in close, expressive brushstrokes, as in Delphi (1959; Hartford, CT, Wadsworth Atheneum). In 1955 he started teaching at the Art Students’ League in New York, and the following year he illustrated Robert Price’s The Hidden Airdrome and Uncollected Poems (Rowe, MA, 1956).
From 1962 to 1970 Stamos was largely occupied in painting the Sun-Box series, which included the most geometrical, austere works of his career. Using coloured rectangles, the ‘sun-box’ and strips set on an unmodulated monochrome background, these works alternately employed bright fiery colours or cold dead tones, as in the dark blue Pandora Sun-Box (1967; Waltham, MA, Brandeis U., Rose A. Mus.). From 1967 to 1968 he was artist-in-residence at Brandeis University, MA, during which time he frequently met Rothko. In 1969 he produced a tapestry, Blue Sun-Box (1969; see Pomeroy, pl. 211) for an office at 150 East 58th Street, New York.
All Stamos’s work from 1971 to the 1990s was part of his Infinity Field series, comprising several sub-series. One of the first of the latter was the Lefkada series, named after the Greek island where he spent much of his time. The earliest of these were geometrical, near hard-edge works using warm, harmonious colours, as in Infinity Field: Lefkada Series (1972; New York, priv. col., see 1984 exh. cat., pl. 61). From 1980 to 1982 this sub-series contained several works in homage to Caspar David Friedrich, using large jagged-edged areas of colour traversed by two or three meandering calligraphic lines, as in Infinity Field: Lefkada Series for C. D. Friedrich (1980–81; Germany, priv. col., see 1984 exh. cat., pl. 81). Similar works can be found in other sub-series, such as Torino Series IX. Sub-series include the Marathon, Knossos, Nemea, Delphi, Yerico and Jerusalem series. As in almost all his work, nature is the prime subject in the Infinity Field series, as is revealed by the dark earth colours and irregular forms that characterize the constituent paintings. ["Stamos, Theodoros." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 11, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T080955.]
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