Theodoros STAMOS
1922–1997, USA/Greece

The youngest of the first-generation abstract expressionists, Theodoros Stamos was born in New York in 1922, to Greek immigrant parents. At thirteen, Stamos received a scholarship to New York’s American Artists’ School, where he studied sculpture. After dropping out of school in 1939, he held several jobs and concentrated on painting. While working in a frame shop in New York from 1941 to 1948, he met Arshile Gorky and Fernand Léger; during the early 1940s he visited An American Place, Stieglitz’s gallery, where he particularly admired the work of Arthur Dove. In 1943, he met Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, with whom he shared an interest in the sciences and primitive cultures. He frequently visited New York’s American Museum of Natural History. Stamos was only twenty when he received his first solo exhibition in 1943 at the Wakefield Gallery in New York, and by the late 1940s he was an established member of the abstract expressionists. Stamos’s interests were closely related to this circle of painters, who during the 1940s searched for profound truth and universally significant content through myth and biomorphic abstraction. The mature techniques of Stamos, Rothko, and Newman, based on expressive color fields, were subdued and tranquil in comparison to the explosive, gestural painting of fellow abstract expressionists Pollock and de Kooning." -phillipscollection.org

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