Stamos Theodoros

Theodoros Stamos was born in New York in 1922 to a family of eight Greek immigrants. Already in his teenage years, he turned to art, and in 1936, on a scholarship that he supplemented financially by working as a model and as an elevator operator, he attended evening classes in sculpture at the American Artists School. There he meets Joseph Solman who advises him to turn to painting. In the following years, Stamos focused on the study of painting, while making a living in various ways, but mainly as a frame maker from 1941 to 1948. He came into contact with great personalities of the American and European avant-garde who lived in New York at that time, such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky and Fernand Léger. In 1943 he holds his first solo exhibition at the Wakefield Gallery and Bookshop, of the historic art dealer Betty Parsons, with whom he will maintain collaboration until 1957. His first works are clearly influenced by Milton Avery and the primitivism of Henri Rousseau, while from the mid-40s he turns to a biomorphism of surrealist origin. In 1948-1949 Stamos traveled to Europe and in the middle of the civil war he visited Greece for the first time. He spends a long time in France where, with the help of Christian Zervos, he gets to know the artistic community and personalities such as Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Constantin Brâncuși. From the beginning of the 50s, Stamos takes his first abstract steps by incorporating elements of a gestural painting with references to oriental calligraphy which gradually lead him towards his characteristic color fields. In 1950 he teaches at the historically important Black Mountain College, while participating with 17 other artists in the artists’ protest movement against the jury of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The informal group includes Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still and Willem de Kooning among others and is known in history as The Irascible Eighteen. From 1958 to 1970 Stamos collaborates with André Emmerich’s gallery. From 1970 he settled in Lefkada and there he began his characteristic series of works Endless Fields, the first of which he presented at the Marlborough Gallery in New York in 1972. His upward artistic path was interrupted in the same year when the scandal also known as the Affair broke out Rothko: following Mark Rothko’s suicide in 1970, the trustees of his estate, including Stamos, are embroiled in a multifaceted legal dispute between the artist’s heirs and the Marlborough Gallery. Although he is undoubtedly one of the pioneers of abstract expressionism, the negative outcome of the trial for him significantly reduces his popularity in the United States. He continues to exhibit in New York, collaborating with Louis K. Meisel Gallery and Kouros Gallery, but also in Europe and Greece. His works are in the collections of major museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and MoMA in the United States as well as the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna. In 1975 he made a large donation to the National Gallery – Museum of Alexandros Soutsos. He died in Ioannina in 1997.