Theodoros Stamos
Greek/American, 1922 - 1997
Death-PlaceGreece
Birth-PlaceNew York, NY
BiographyTheodoros Stamos (1922-1997)
Even though Theodoros Stamos was born and resided in downtown Manhattan, his paintings have never been directly informed by his interaction with the city. Rather, at a surprisingly early age, Stamos began to apply his formidable talents as an abstractionist to conjure up imagery loosely associated with natural phenomena. In the early 1940s the artist-under the influence of European Surrealists who painted biomorphic forms-created pictures containing figures that resemble plants or sea creatures, such as eels and jellyfish. In 1943, at the age of twenty, Stamos had his first one-man exhibition, at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. That year he met Adolf Gottlieb and the painter/theorist Barnett Newman.
Over the next few years, Stamos played an integral role in the development of the New York School, helping to formulate new conceptions of how the artist could represent primal experiences and mythical imagery as part of the psychology of the modern mind. Such mysticizing imagery was partially motivated by the atrocities of World War II.
In 1947 Newman wrote an emphatic essay for Stamos’s second solo exhibition, at Parsons Gallery, entitled “The Ideographic Picture.” This essay was crucial for the development of Stamos’s career, as it championed his own brand of pictorial signs and associated them with an avant-garde notion of the primitive. Newman portrayed Stamos as uniquely capable of ritualizing the artistic act so that he could tap into the timeless primal forces that underlie the natural world. By the late 1940s, Stamos was depicting fewer, though larger, patches of color and was now obsessively investigating a pictorial format that juxtaposed long Y-shaped bands with smaller, circular figures. In addition, he became increasingly reliant on the dynamics of the paint itself to express his subject matter.
In the 1950s Stamos continued his interest in emphasizing technique over specific imagery and his brushwork became more violent and forceful. In 1970, after the artist’s close friend Mark Rothko committed suicide, Stamos traveled to Greece to visit the ancient ruins and his father's birthplace on the island of Leukas. He moved to Leukas in 1972, spending part of every year there, and his reconnection with both his family heritage and with nature manifested itself in more animated primitive canvases. Later works were similarly based on the artist's experiences' during his trip to the Holy Land in 1983 and following a brush with death in 1990.
Cathedral, 1949-50
Oil on masonite, 51 1/4 x 25 5/8 in. (130.2 x 65.1 cm)
Signed (lower left): STAMOS; signed and inscribed (verso): “At Chartres” / “Cathedral” / 1949-50 / STAMOS / 45 E. 22 st N.Y.C.
General Purchase Fund (1992.1)
When Stamos created “Cathedral”, he was twenty-seven years old. Remarkably, it corresponds in style, content, and maturity of expression to the contemporaneous production of his older peers Adoph Gottlieb and William Baziotes. Like these painters, who were among the first generation of the Abstract Expressionists, Stamos sought to explore mythic and primordial imagery as a means of discovering universal truths about nature and human experience. (1)
In the diffused painterly light in “Cathedral”, figures with blurred outlines appear to float ambiguously within the picture space. As in William Baziotes’s works of this period, the density and palpable aspects of Stamos’s pictorial composition suggest an underwater setting, which is in keeping with both artists’ acute interest in lower, primal forms of life. (2) In contrast to Baziotes's preference for atmospheric dreamscapes, Stamos preferred a more literal mode of paint application-most evident, in the case of Cathedral, in the dragging of a large brush in the upper left section of the work-that presents the beholder with a different set of interpretive options. In addition to a color scheme that incorporates various shades of gray, off-white, and brown, the jagged edges of the central forms might imply a vision of a subterranean cave or an abstracted architectural image, as the title of the picture suggests.
DA
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Ralph Pomeroy, “Stamos” (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1972); Robert Metzger, “Abstract Expressionism Lives,” exhib. cat. (Stamford, Conn.: Stamford Museum and Nature Center, 1982), pp. 5-12; Sam Hunter, “Theodoros Stamos: History and Recent Paintings,” “Arts Magazine 62” (Summer 1988): 56-59; Stamos, “Theodoros Stamos: Works from 1945-1984” (New York: Turske and Turske, 1991).
Notes:
1. . Pomeroy, “Stamos,” pp. 9-10.
2 . See Sam Hunter, “Theodoros Stamos,” pp. 57-59
Person Type(not assigned)
