Untitled (From the High Snow, Low Sun Series)
(1922-1997)
Theodoros Stamos is heralded as one of the few abstract painters who bridged the New York School’s first and second generations. His age, in particular, afforded him this unique position, as he was the youngest member of the “Irascibles,” the core group of fifteen New York School painters publicized by Nina Leen’s 1951 photograph in Life magazine. Like his New York School contemporaries, in particular his close friends Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, Stamos continuously explored the workings of artistic form through color. Throughout his long career, Stamos has continued to be renowned as an abstract expressionist.
Born in 1922 in New York to parents of Greek heritage, Stamos showed exceptional promise early in life. At thirteen years old, in 1936, 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 Salmon who was a member of the politically engaged group of artists called “The Ten”, which included Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko. Solmon encouraged Stamos to paint and to visit New York galleries, where he saw the paintings of Milton Avery, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin and Paul Klee. He also visited the American Museum of Natural History and read texts on the natural sciences and translations Chinese and Japanese literature. His first paintings represented primitive Greek imagery and landscapes of the New Jersey Palisades.
Stamos was an active player in the New York avant-garde during the early years of Abstract Expressionism. His art attracted the attention not only of noted dealer Betty Parsons but also of museums and private collectors, among them the Museum of Modern Art, Peggy Guggenheim, and Edward R. Root, who began to acquire works by the artist. His work first caught the eye of Parsons, who organized his first solo exhibition at her Wakefield Gallery and Bookstore in 1943, when the artist was just twenty-one. Other commercial and critical success followed, and from 1943 to 1947, Stamos received three one-man shows and participated in several important group exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum’s annual and the important early show of Abstract Expressionist painting, “The Ideographic Picture,” which was curated by Barnett Newman
at Betty Parsons Gallery. Stamos established lasting friendships with both Newman and Rothko, who shared with the younger artist an interest in primitive and mythological imagery.
A lover of travel, in 1947 Stamos traveled throughout the United States, visiting New Mexico, California, and the Northwest. In 1948 he sailed for Europe, visiting France, Italy, and Greece. In Paris he met many of the renowned modernists including Picasso, Brancusi and Giacometti. Always sensitive to the particularities of light, mood, and color of specific locales, Stamos's paintings are indexes of his responses to different places. Later in his career, he devoted several series of paintings to sites including Jerusalem, Delphi, and Lefkada, an island in the Ionian Sea.
Throughout his career, Stamos was also a dedicated teacher and held numerous positions. He taught at Hartley Settlement House for four years in the early 1950s, and at the progressive Black Mountain College, where he met Clement Greenberg and had Kenneth Noland as one of his students. In 1951, Stamos moved to East Marion, New York, where he developed an expressive color-field technique. In 1955, he began teaching at the Art Students League in New York, a position he would hold for twenty-two years. His prolific painting career continued in the 1990’s, when ACA Galleries, New York and the Municipal Art Gallery in Thessaloniki, Greece honored him with retrospective exhibitions. After a prolonged illness, Stamos died on February 2, 1997.
Stamos’s art appears in countless private and public collections in the United States and internationally, among them The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; National Picture Gallery, Athens, Greece; San Francisco Art Institute Galleries; Tel Aviv Museum, Israel; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; The Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; The Chrysler Art Museum, Norfolk, Virginia; The Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; and Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung, Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich, Germany.
Post War Inventory
- Karel Appel Personnages et Oiseaux II
- Karel Appel Personage and Landscape
- Karel Appel Birds over the Village
- Richard Artschwagger Untitled (Levi's Painting), 1981
- Ruth Lanier Asawa Untitled
- Ruth Asawa Untitled
- Pablo Atchugarry Untitled
- Bernard Aubertin Tableau Clous
- Milton Avery Vincent Spano
- Milton Avery Blue Nude
- Afro Basaldella Untitled
- William Baziotes Figures Against the Sun
- William Baziotes Untitled
- Leon Berkowitz Algonquit No 15
- Norman Bluhm Untitled (Blue and Black)
- Norman Bluhm Untitled (Purple and Black)
- Norman Bluhm Untitled (Red and Black)
- Norman Bluhm Untitled (blue and Black)
- Norman Bluhm Untitled (Pink and Black)
- Norman Bluhm Untitled, 1
- Norman Bluhm Untitled
- Norman Bluhm Fifth Season
- Norman Bluhm In tThe Earth
- Norman Bluhm Ash Hollow
- Norman Bluhm Steel Grass
- Norman Bluhm Untitled
- Norman Bluhm Coelus II
- Norman Bluhm Turkish Delight
- Mel Bochner Chuckle
- James Brooks Zog
- James Brooks Untitled
- Alexander Calder Construction with Stripes
- Alexander Calder Black Compass
- Alexander Calder Boomerang Night
- Alexander Calder Untitled
- Alexander Calder Narning Needles and Rattler
- Alexander Calder Butterfly and Serpent
- Alexander Calder Ciel d'Egypt, 1975
- Massimo Campigli Untitled
- Nicholas Carone Untitled
- Giorgio Cavallon Untitled
- ED Clark Moroccan Series
- Allan D'Arcangelo Proposition #8
- Allan D'Arcangelo Landscape
- Gene Davis Pinocchio
- Gene Davis Untitled
- Willem DeKooning Untitled ( Woman)
- Willem DeKooning Untitled
- Jim Dine A Crescent Wrench
- Jim Dine Heart in a Landscape
- Friedel Dzubas Night Flight
- Friedel Dzubas Sungod
- Friedel Dzubas Aurora
- Friedel Dzubas Up Delta
- Friedel Dzubas Roundabout
- Mark Flood Decorations on Her Body
- Sam Francis Untitled (SFP94-80),
- Sam Francis Untitled (SF62-0200
- Sam Francis Untitled (SF92-9), 1993
- Sam Francis Untitled - SF90-171,
- Sam Francis Untitled - SF89-112
- Sam Francis Untitled (Tokyo Series)
- Helen Frankenthaler Untitled (Purple and Black)
- Helen Frankenthaler Summer'59 Number 1
- Helen Frankenthaler Hope Spring
- Michael Goldberg Untitled
- Michael Goldberg Still Life with Tiffany Lamp
- Michael Goldberg Untitled
- Michael Goldberg Our Delight
- Ron Gorchov Capital
- John Grillo Untitled
- Peter Halley Untitled
- Al Held Primo 6
- Damien Hirst Crushung Pain
- Hans Hofmann Serenity
- Hans Hofmann Red Triangle
- Hans Hofmann On The Pier
- Hans Hofmann Untitled
- Hans Hofmann Zig Zag
- Paul Jenkins Phenomena Hokusai Fall
- Paul Jenkins Phenomena Ultra Scape
- Ellsworth Kelly Colored Paper Image XII (Blue Curve with Brown and Gray),
- Yayoi Kusama Chikuma River
- Alfred Leslie Number 5
- Roy Lichtenstein Reflections on Minerva
- Pat Lipsky Chinese
- Conrad Marca-Relli The Dressmaker
- Conrad Marca-Relli Untitled #4
- Conrad Marca-Relli Battle Detail
- Conrad Marca-Relli F-S-8-67
- Conrad Marca-Relli L-3-72
- Georges Mathieu Lothaire Sort Secretment De Leon
- Robert Motherwell In Blue Ochre with Gauloises
- Robert Motherwell Untitled
- Robert Motherwell Little A
- Robert Motherwell Summer Collage
- Robert Motherwell Sea Lion with Red Stripe
- Louise Nevelson Untitled (Moon Plant),
- Louise Nevelson Series of Unknown Cosmos XXXIX
- Louise Nevelson Untitled, 1974
- Gaston Novelli A.5
- Claes Oldenburg Punching Bag
- Jules Olitski Fi
- Jules Olitski Salacion Touch-3
- Abraham Palatnik Untitled
- Richard Pettibone Harran III
- Arnoldo Pomodoro Pillars in Amaliehaven
- Larry Poons Untitled #1
- Richard Pousette-Dart Small Dark Room
- Richard Pousette-Dart Serpentine Saffron
- Milton Resnick Untitled
- Larry Rivvers Iron Maiden (Ford Fender)
- James Rosenquist Blue Light Bulb Beer Can 1/2 Eye Glass Lens
- Mimmo Rotella Ars-Gratis-Artis
- Julian Schnabel La Hija Pequeña, la Madrastra y el Amigo Mariquita, (The Little Daughter, The Stepmother and the Friend Ladybug
- Sean Scully 9.1.96
- Turi Simeti Un Ovale Rosso
- Theodoros Stamos Field I
- Theodoros Stamos Infinity Field, Lefkada Series
- Theodoros Stamos Lefkada Series
- Theodoros Stamos Mistra
- Theodoros Stamos Aegean Sunbox # 12
- Theodoros Stamos Classic Yellow Sun-Box
- Frank Stella The Honor and Glory of Whaling (Maquette)
- Frank Stella Nowe Miastro
- Donald Sultan Peppers
- Bob Thompson The Struggle
- Julius Tobias Untitled
- Esteban Vicente Luminous
- Andy Warhol Ali Fist
- Andy Warhol Flowers
- Andy Warhol Cup of Coffee
- Tom Wesselmann Maquette for Tulip and Smoking Cigarette, 1983
- Tom Wesselmann Monica Asleep on Blanket
- Michael (Corinne) West Green Apple
- Michael (Corinne) West Nihilism
- Michael (Corinne) West Study
- Michael (Corinne) West The Atonement
- MIchael West Untitled
- Michael West Still Life Objects
- Michael West Theorem Duty
- MIchael West Continuity of Change
- MIchael West Dagger of Light