Stamos was one of the original and youngest
Abstract Expressionist artists working in
New York City in the 1940s and 50s. He was born on Manhattan's Lower East Side to Greek immigrant parents; his mother was from Sparta, and his father was raised in Lefkada. As a teenager, he won a scholarship to the
American Artists School, where he studied sculpture with Simon Kennedy and Joseph Konzal. His instructor
Joseph Solman, who was a member of the group The Ten, became a mentor to Stamos. At Solman's urging, Stamos visited
Alfred Stieglitz's influential An American Place Gallery, where he encountered the work of
Arthur Dove and
Georgia O'Keeffe, among others. During this period, the late 1930s and early 1940s, Stamos held a variety of odd jobs: printer, florist, hat-blocker, and book salesman. Through one job, at Herbert Benevy's Gramercy Art frame shop on East 18th Street, he met members of the European avant-garde, including Arshile Gorky and Fernand Léger. In 1943, when Stamos was 21 years old, prominent dealer
Betty Parsons gave him a solo exhibition at her Wakefield Gallery and Bookshop. Parsons became an important ally and connection to the contemporary New York art world; Stamos would show regularly with her until 1957. By the mid-1940s, his career was becoming well established—he exhibited at the
Whitney Museum annually from 1945 to 1951, at the
Carnegie Institute and the
Art Institute of Chicago in 1947, and at the
Museum of Modern Art in 1948. Also during this period, Stamos' work began attracting the attention of collectors. The Museum of Modern art purchased Stamos'
Sounds in the Rock in 1946. And Edward Wales Root, who became both a supporter of Stamos' career and a benefactor of the
Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, bought the first of many paintings from the artist in 1945. The artist's paintings from the 1940s combine muted earth-toned colors with biomorphic imagery, suggesting geologic shapes or inchoate organic forms. This dovetails with Stamos' interest in natural history; as artist Barnett Newman observed in the introduction to Stamos' 1947 exhibition with Betty Parsons Gallery, "His ideographs capture the moment of totemic affinity with the rock and the mushroom, the crayfish and the seaweed. He re-defines the pastoral experience as one of participation with the inner life of the natural phenomenon." During the late 1940s he became a member of
The Irascible Eighteen, a group of abstract painters who protested the
Metropolitan Museum of Art's policy towards
American painting of the 1940s and who posed for a famous picture in 1950; members of the group considered as the 'first generation' of
abstract expressionists included:
Willem de Kooning,
Adolph Gottlieb,
Ad Reinhardt,
Hedda Sterne,
Richard Pousette-Dart,
William Baziotes,
Jimmy Ernst,
Jackson Pollock,
James Brooks,
Clyfford Still,
Robert Motherwell,
Bradley Walker Tomlin, Theodoros Stamos,
Barnett Newman, and
Mark Rothko. These artists are part of the
New York School and they were referred to as
The Irascibles in an article featured in an issue of
Life where the infamous
Nina Leen photograph was published. Around 1950, Stamos began exploring a new approach to abstraction. Inspired by East Asian aesthetics, he created his Tea House series of paintings, characterized by softly defined geometric forms painted with a limited palette and often overlaid by dark calligraphic brushwork. Later in the 1950s, Stamos worked with compositions that became increasingly reductive and simplified. He explored the use of layers of thin pigment, carefully worked, to create depth in his broad expanses of color. Stamos traveled widely during much of his adult life. In 1947, he traveled by train to New Mexico and the Pacific Northwest. In 1948 and 49, he visited Europe, including parts of Greece, and possibly Egypt.
Rothko Case Mark Rothko chose his friend to be an
executor of his estate, however this led to his involvement in the
Rothko Case, a major lawsuit and scandal in the art world. A little over a year after his suicide in 1970, Rothko's daughter sued the estate's executors, as well as the Marlborough Gallery, for waste and
fraud. Over twelve years of litigation and appeals, it was revealed that many of Rothko's paintings, which had been sold or consigned by his estate to the Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan, were sold at intentionally deflated prices to favored clients while the gallery collected inflated commissions as high as 50 percent, compared with the 30 percent usually charged for an artist of his caliber; the executors, meanwhile, divided the estate's proceeds from Marlborough as their fees. Stamos willingly joined the conspiracy, and was enticed to switch his representation from the
André Emmerich Gallery by a more generous contract with the Marlborough. The defendants were found guilty and fined over $9 million; Stamos paid his share of the fine by signing over his house to the Rothko estate, but he was granted
life tenancy. While the case did much to enhance Rothko's reputation, it did serious damage to the reputation of both the gallery and Stamos. Stamos never recovered as an artist. Galleries on the level of Emmerich or the pre-scandal Marlborough would not represent his work. The lack of support from top galleries gave collectors a lesser sense of security regarding the value of his work and, possibly with general assessments of his work as an artist, caused his work to be perceived as low, second-tier or third-rank Abstract Expressionism by 1998. ==Works==