Modern and Contemporary Art

Note

Part of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, Theodoros Stamos was one of the youngest members of the “Irascibles Eighteen,” a group of abstract painters in the 1940s who protested the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s policy toward American Art. Working in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, Stamos exhibited his work alongside fellow abstract painters and “Irascibles,” like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell.

Stamos is best known for his subtle abstract compositions, characterized by a broad use of color, broken by lines and soft geometric shapes. He once said of his work, “The great figurative painters were involved with grandeur of vision, using the figure as a means to an end, whereas today the best of the abstract painters are also involved with a grandeur of vision using color as their means toward a new space-light.” [1] Born in New York in 1922 to first generation immigrants, Stamos’s Greek heritage and appreciation for other cultures were important influences on his art. His early works from the 1940s show an interest in natural history, which Stamos expressed through a palette of muted earth-tones and compositions of abstract shapes reminiscent of geologic and organic forms.

From the 1950s on, Stamos took a new approach to abstraction and began creating works as part of series or subseries. For example, his Tea House series from this period consists of simplified compositions of soft geometric shapes with dark calligraphic brushwork, inspired by his interest in travel, East Asian aesthetics and ancient belief systems. His works continued to become increasingly reductive, with focuses on broad, expanding grounds of color and light. Stamos’s Infinity Field Series, which encompasses his works created after 1971, is a series of abstract yet meditative compositions characterized by moody fields of color and light, often broken by slim lines and large shapes. Infinity Field Lefkada Series, created in 1978, is a part of the Infinity Field subseries. The Lefkada subseries was inspired by the Greek islands of the same name, which Stamos frequented from 1970 until his death in 1997.

[1] Marika Herskovic, ed., American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s: An Illustrated Survey with Artists’ Statements, Artwork, and Biographies, Franklin Lakes, New Jersey: New York School Press, 2003, p. 318.