The Parrish Art Museum - East End Stories

The work of the first-generation Abstract Expressionist painter Theodoros Stamos occupies a unique place in the genesis and extended history of the New York School. After studying sculpture in the mid-1930s under Simon Kennedy and Joseph Konzal at the American Artists School in New York, Stamos devoted himself to painting, proceeding intuitively and shunning formal instruction. His apparently spontaneous and unencumbered attitude toward the performative aspect of painting became something of a signature approach to the generation that came of age after Jackson Pollock’s death in 1956. What Stamos may have initially lacked in instruction he more than made up for in firsthand observation; in 1941 he opened a frame shop near Union Square in Manhattan, where he regularly handled pictures by Arshile Gorky, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, and others. In 1948 he began traveling, frequently and extensively, throughout the United States and Europe. The ideal of a perfect synthesis of Surrealism, with its interest in myth and the irrational unconscious, with biomorphic abstraction, so commonly explored by American painters in the pre–Abstract Expressionist era, never left Stamos. However, he reduced the literary underpinnings of his own work in favor of allowing form and color to convey most of a painting’s impact. In this regard his painting was imbued with something of the smoldering radiance of the work of his close friend Mark Rothko, or the organic feel of motifs in the work of his Greek compatriot William Baziotes. In addition to pioneering a new form of Color Field abstraction, Stamos had a distinguished career as a teacher, first in 1950 at Black Mountain College and then for more extended periods in New York, initially at the Hartley Settlement House and later, from 1955, at the Art Students League, where he was a popular instructor for more than two decades. [Gregory Galligan]