Theodoros Stamos is notable for his early use of color to explore possibilities of abstraction and form in painting. Youngest of the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters and youngest member of the “Irascibles,” the vanguard group of American artists memorialized in Nina Leen’s 1950 photograph, Stamos developed an expressive color field process (Color Field Painting) or Post-Painterly Abstraction as Clement Greenberg referenced this painting style. Stamos, a major contributor to the Color Field Movement, was once quoted as saying:
“…my feeling was to create more infinity with color…”
Born in 1922 to Greek immigrant parents on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Stamos began his formal study of art in 1936 with a scholarship to the American Artists School. Under the guidance of his teacher, Joseph Solman, and Betty Parsons, who gave him his first solo exhibition at the Wakefield Gallery in 1943, Stamos pursued his interest in painting and began studying surrealist literature. Influenced by automatism and the work of William Baziotes, Stamos began to employ indeterminate psychosomatic forms as subjects. An Abstract Expressionist, Stamos joined the likes of Pollock, de Kooning, and Rothko to become the youngest member of The Irascible Eighteen during the late 1940s, and his work is now credited as a precursor to the Color Field movement. Stamos went on to teach at prominent institutions such as the Art Students League of New York, Cummington School of Fine Arts, and Black Mountain College. He continues to be exhibited by more than fifty major museums and institutions worldwide. He died in his father’s hometown of Lefkada, Greece in 1997.
Stamos worked in large series toward the later part of his career including his Cretan series, Lefkada series, and Jerusalem series each referring to a region that held a historic or cultural interest for the artist. In the Jerusalem series we see many of the color fields broken up by markings and hieroglyphics that feel like semi-readable writing from an ancient time. They denote a richness of a culture that is deep and where man has long stood. In our work, there are swathes of a ghostly colored white that lays over a rich ground which makes the work glow and feel layered. Stamos, like most of his abstract counterparts, wanted to give a “feel” of something and never a literal interpretation. He was highly successful if not more successful in these series in achieving that result. There is no one who looks at these who does not have a myriad of ideas, thoughts and reactions to them. They stand as spiritual maps, banners and monuments to culture and history.