Theodoros Stamos

Galleria del Naviglio, Milan

Private Collection, Milan (acquired directly from the above)

Christie's, New York, November 6, 1985, lot 4

Private Collection (acquired from the above sale)

Sotheby's New York, 29 September 2016, lot 21

Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

"The work of Theodoros Stamos, subtle and sensuous as it is, reveals an attitude towards nature that is closer to true communion. His ideographs capture the moment of totemic affinity with the rock and the mushroom, the crayfish and the seaweed. He redefines the pastoral experience as one of participation with the inner life of the natural phenomenon. One might say that instead of going into the rock, he comes out of it." Barnett Newman in: Exh. Cat., New York, Betty Parsons Gallery, The Ideographic Picture, 1947, n.p.

Theodoros Stamos was one of the original abstract expressionists working in New York City in the 1940s and 50s. His interest in nature, Surrealism, primitive arts and Asian Mysticism helped him to synthesize a non-representational language, which he emphasized with subtle gradations of colour and form on which he imposed calligraphic configurations. 

Born to Greek immigrants in New York City as the fourth of six children, Stamos was awarded a scholarship to the American Artists' School aged fourteen, where he studied sculpture. This was his only formal art education and when he turned to painting in 1939 he was considered by his peers to be a self-taught painter, an artist who relied on the tools and models available to and observable by him. By the late 1940s Stamos was an established member of the abstract expressionists. His interests were closely related to this circle of painters, who during the 1940s and 1950s searched for profound truth and universally significant content through myth and biomorphic abstraction, which Stamos, similarly to Rothko, conveyed through expressive colour fields. His aim was to create imagery that was drawn from nature and would be universal in spirit. Typically his canvases consist of large, flat areas of few colours applied in close, expressive brushstrokes.