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.
This marvelous Stamos painting is in celebration of the Rizitika which is the name for certain types of songs that have their origin in Crete. It is said that at the foot of the mountains in Crete, certain songs came to be written and sung and there are referred to as Rizitikas. They are not songs by individuals that have been noted, so they are by unknown composers. The songs are often referred to by their first verse.
The history of this culture of songs and music would have inspired Stamos who was eternally interested in his Infinity Field works about depicting the ancient culture of Greece. Often there are symbols and what appear to be markings in the Infinity Field series paintings, almost like they are etched into the side of textured rocks or earth. It is as if this is the footprint of man over time in this culture. This painting has a marvelous blue color field and a wonderful azure that surely was inspired by the region and the day he painted the work.
These are abstractions that reference air, earth, wind, sky and fire and all the elements of life and man. They are really universally about the fact that we all come from a culture of traditions and that we are made up of people and cultures that come before us and we breed the ones that will move forward in time.