Biography

Theodoros Stamos was born in New York on December 31, 1922, into a large family. His father, who had been a fisherman on the Greek Island of Lefkada (Lefkas), ran a hat-cleaning establishment in New York, and “when business was good the whole family worked there. But it was never easy: They had a very hard time at the beginning. I guess they had a hard time till they died. They never enjoyed anything. They had seven children and each went off his own way in the end… I went off, my sister went off. She studied dancing, I studied painting and sculpture… It was a hard immigrant's life“.

At the age of fourteen, Stamos made a drawing that won him a scholarship for classes at the American Artists School on Fourteenth Street, which he attended at night, after finishing his daytime classes at Stuyvesant High School and doing odd jobs during after-school hours and on weekends. The American Artists School had a leftist orientation, and so did Stamos, who became a Communist sympathizer. But with the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the outbreak of World War II, he broke with the Communists, left high school three weeks before graduation, and was expelled from art school for his political activities.4 Ineligible for service in the armed forces (he received a 4-F because of a childhood injury), Stamos spent the war years working in factories.

During the 1940s, Stamos developed a distinct style of abstraction that derives chiefly from the biomorphism of French Surrealism but maintains a dialogue with the work of other American painters, notably Milton Aíery and Arthur Dove. Stamos's first solo exhibitions at Bety Parsons's ground-breaking gallery and the Mortimer Brandt Gallery in the early 194os were harbingers of the Abstract Expressionist movement. He was only twenty-three when the Museum of Modern Art purchased his painting Sounds in the Rock in 1946. For the next twenty-five years, Stamos enjoyed considerable success. He became a leading member of the New York School and a close colleague of such artists as Barnett Newman and Adolph Gottlieb. The sun, the sea, and the earth remained Stamos's primary sources of inspiration, and his monumental abstract paintings convey a strong sense of the radiant beauty of nature.

His companion, Robert Price, died suddenly in 1955. After the suicide of his close friend Mark Rothko in 1970, and the emotional and financial strains of the prolonged lawsuit (1971-75) against Rothko's dealer and the executors of Rothko's estate, of whom he was one, Stamos moved to his father's island, Lefkada. There he continued to produce vital and exciting works until his death in 1997.

“I got what I think is the essence of Greece in those pictures. Everybody sees Greece as a very, very brilliant country…. My pictures became very dark. I think there is enough light that those pictures give off with their darkness, that I believe is more Greece in the sense of the tragedy of that country…. For 300 years they've had wars. And this to me is more important than painting light and trees.“