Theodoros Stamos

Theodoros Stamos (born December 31, 1922 in New York , † February 2, 1997 in Ioannina ) was an American painter of Greek origin. His works are assigned to Abstract Expressionism .

life and work

Stamos was born in New York on New Year's Eve 1922. His parents were Greek immigrants - his mother came from Sparta , his father, who ran a hat and shoe shine shop, from the island of Lefkada in the Ionian Sea . At the age of eight he fell and suffered a ruptured spleen . During the long period of convalescence he began to draw.

In 1936 he enrolled at Peter Stuyvesant High School, a technical college, and began studying art. One pictured in a newspaper sculpture by Jacob Epstein inspired him, so he loomed these and together with Simon Kennedy and Joseph Konzal the sculpture moved. He received a scholarship from the American Artist's School. The following year he met Joseph Solman , a member of The Ten , who brought him back to painting by showing him works by Milton Avery , Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley . Stamos dropped out of Stuyvesant High School three months before graduation . He had recognized that the effort involved in sculptural work was greater, but financially and spatially alone he could not manage this. As a result, he was a guest in various studios around 10th Street. It was there that the autodidact's first pictures to be taken seriously were taken . They show simple, but figurative, Greek and American landscapes. He made his living as a florist and bookseller. In 1941 he finally opened a small framing shop in Manhattan , which brought him into contact with other artists such as Arshile Gorky and Fernand Léger . His most profitable framing order came from the Nierendorf Gallery , for which he prepared numerous Paul Klee pictures. The Wakefield Gallery, operated by Betty Parsons , exhibited his works for the first time in 1943, paving the way for becoming an important point of contact for Abstract Expressionism. That year Stamos met Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman , who were still to be important to him . The images from this phase are Movement of Plants ( dt. : Movement of plants ), Seedling , Composition with Braided Ropes and ancestrial flows . They contain elements of surrealism such as those of Max Ernst , Joan Miró or Paul Klee, who is well known to him for his framing work. Adolph Gottlieb also left deep impressions, recognizable in the biomorphic forms. Movement of Plants was shown in the Whitney Museum's annual exhibition in 1945 and found a buyer who, in the course of his passion for collecting, brought together 32 Stamos paintings that are now in the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica , New York . The first picture acquired by a museum is called Klänge im Felsen in German and has been hanging in the New York Museum of Modern Art since 1946 . In 1947 he met Mark Rothko , Kurt Seligmann and Peggy Guggenheim . On his travels through the United States, he met Mark Tobey , with whom he exchanged pictures. A friendship arose with John Graham . Together with the poet Robert Price he traveled to France, Italy and Greece. Through Christian Zervos he got to know Constantin Brâncuși , Victor Brauner , Alberto Giacometti , Henri Laurens and Pablo Picasso . He met his compatriot, Morris Graves , who also liked to travel , in Chartres . This was inclined to the Far Eastern culture, which Stamos took over a little later. But first he began to collect objects and furniture of the Art Nouveau . He closed his frame shop in 1948 when, on the recommendation of the minimalist sculptor Tony Smith , Stamos began teaching at Heartley Settlement House in 1949. He taught there for four years. He also gave art classes at the famous progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina , where among his students was the painter Kenneth Noland , who emulated him stylistically . Here he also met the leading art critic of Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg . Around 1950 Stamos began to paint his Tea House series, in which he used East Asian elements. At that time he joined the artist group “The Irascibles”, was by far its youngest member and was very interested in the art of his colleagues who were inclined to surrealism. In 1951 he turned to color field painting . He received a grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. On Long Island he had a house built according to the plans of Tony Smith.

In the mid-1950s he took on various teaching positions , for example at the Chicago Art Institute and the Art Student's League in New York. The year 1954 was marked by his lecture held at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC , on the subject of "Why Nature in Art?", Which became famous in the professional world, and the death of his close friend, the poet Robert Price, for the new edition of which he made illustrations in 1956 . In the same year he was awarded one of the prizes of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and in 1961 at the 6th Tokyo International the Mainchini Newspaper Prize.

In 1962 Stamos started its series called Sun-Boxes . The first picture in the series is Very Low Sun-Box , painted with acrylic and oil paint on canvas . In 1967 the first picture of the Transparent Sun-Boxes followed - and in 1969 that of the Cheops Sun-Boxes series. In 1966 he gave a guest lecture at Columbia University , School of Fine Arts in New York and in the following year he was granted the right to live as the third artist at Brandeis University in Massachusetts as an " artist-in-residence ". He was also awarded the National Arts Foundation Award. His contact with Mark Rothko of the Irascibles intensified during this time and neither of them suspected that it would have disastrous consequences four years later. In 1969 Stamos completed a huge work for the entrance hall of an office building in Manhattan. Soon he began a new series of pictures, which he called the Infinity Field Series (sometimes with the addition of a location, for example Infinity Field Jerusalem Series ), which expanded the previous rectangular representation from the "box" shown to the edge of the canvas.

After Rothko's suicide Stamos was the Rothko as one of three executors had been determined in the dubious machinations of another executor involved. The two Rothko children (20 and 7 years old) went to court in 1971 for selling off their father's works. Stamos lost his home and reputation in the process. Before the trial, he had been to Greece for the second time, and now he bought a house on Lefkada, where he found new inspiration by taking walks by the sea . In 1977 he gave up his last remaining lecturing activity to inspire his creativity while traveling. In 1983 he felt by a BBC - documentation on the case Rothko slandered, but his suit was hopeless, so he withdrew. At the same time, a small group, mainly Europeans, came together who, under the name “The Circle of Friends of Theodoros Stamos”, resolved to bring their favorite artist out of the blue. In 1994 Stamos was elected a member ("NA") of the National Academy of Design . After suffering from a chronic lung disease, Theodoros Stamos died on February 2, 1997 in the hospital in the western Greek city of Ioannina. In February 2010, the sale of the oil painting Home of the Sun at Christie's in London reached a high of 283,000 US dollars for the artist.

style

If he hadn't become a painter, he would have become a gardener, Stamos once said. The desire to travel and the preoccupation with “primitive” cultures did the rest and made him appear as a natural painter in his artistic implementation. He began with landscapes and initially traced the motifs back to biomorphic objects, which for him embodied an originality, in order to put himself in a pre-cultural state. He used muted colors and designed soft edges for the organic forms, similar to Milton Avery and William Baziotes . The shapes are sometimes reduced to cracked, bright lines of color. In keeping with his origins and his fascination with prehistoric times, there are often references to Hellenistic mythology in his pictures.

The actual early years (after the experimental and stylistic years) were stylistically dominated by surrealism. With the series created from 1954 onwards, layers of color fields emerged, about which Herbert Schneidler wrote: “The viewer becomes aware of landscape associations: an atmospheric horizon builds up over a narrow strip of earth - from the microscopic-looking detail painting before 1950 a cosmological one now grows World - pictures that seem to be reminiscent of pictures from CD Friedrich in their design . The imagery of Stamos, which has become formless, is now only made up of the elements light, air, earth and water. The image becomes a [sic] metaphor for primeval nature. ”Around 1959, the color fields were arranged vertically. All drawing elements were gone and contrasting colors took control. This culminated in the Sun Boxes series in 1962 . Clear geometric shapes on a monochrome background prevail in these pictures . In the 1970s, in addition to the Infinity Field series, which developed from a color field to a colored body, he also created the Color Fields , a continuation of the method he practiced in the 1950s: “The individual colored areas are again blurred, they grip into each other and the transparent coloring prevails over the hermetic color concept of the Sun-Boxes . ”In the Dark Paintings series from the early 1980s, calligraphic horizontal lines in tendentially gloomy pictures become light carriers thanks to their lighter coloring. In the following series, only short line fragments appear, as it were traces of light, “which give the pictures a moving texture”. In addition, grimaceous forms protrude from the dark foregrounds a few times. Schneidler said: “You don't remind us of the end, but rather of the beginning of our world; to where Stamos started his art in terms of content. "

Stamos explored the effect of color in abstraction early on. His color layer technique was a forerunner of the color field movement. He reacted sensitively to the peculiarities of light, mood and color of the venues he visited and often processed his feelings in location-specific series.

meaning

Already in the late forties there were positive critic voices for the young up-and-coming artist who spoke of “moody colors” and “calm poetry”, as well as negative opinions because the role models (like William Baziotes) are better. Stamos was featured in almost every major exhibition of the 1950s, but by the 1970s it was underrepresented or completely ignored. After the inheritance dispute, it never regained its old status. For the last 30 years of his life, Stamos was something of an outcast in the art world, at least in the US. He continued to exhibit in New York, but less often and in less prestigious galleries. The demand for images has long been modest. But the Rothko scandal was not actually the main cause. Rather, it was a reassessment of his art that was not considered to belong to the forefront of Abstract Expressionism. For some, he never belonged to the first ranks of Abstract Expressionism artists.

Solo exhibitions

• 1943, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1956: Betty Parsons Wakefield Gallery, New York City
• 1944, 1945: Mortimer Brandt Gallery, New York City
• 1948, 1950: Margaret Brown Gallery, Boston
• 1950, 1954: The Duncan Phillips Collection (or The Phillips Collection), Washington DC
• 1952: Baldwin Kingrey, Inc., Chicago
• 1954: Wesleyan Conservatory, Macon, Georgia
• 1955: The DeCordova and Dana Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts
• 1957: Philadelphia Arts Alliance, Philadelphia
• 1957: Gump's Gallery, San Francisco
• 1957: Michigan State University Department of Art, East Lansing, Michigan
• 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1970: André Emmerich Gallery, New York City
• 1958: The Corcoran Gallery of Art , Washington, DC
• 1960: Gimpel Fils, London
• 1960: Marion Koogler MacNay Art Institute, San Antonio, Texas
• 1961: Galleria del Naviglio, Milan
• 1967: Springold Theater Arts Center Gallery, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
• 1968: Theo Waddington Fine Arts Ltd., Montreal
• 1972: Marlborough Gallery, New York City
• 1973: Joslyn Art Museum , Omaha, Nebraska
• 1974: Athens Gallery, Athens
• 1977, 1979, 1981, 1984, 1992: Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York City
• 1977: Le Portrait Gallery, Heidelberg
• 1977: Morgan Gallery, Shawnee Mission, Kansas
• 1978: Tomasulo Gallery, Union College, Union, New Jersey
• 1978, 1986: Hokin Gallery, Palm Beach, Florida
• 1978: Union College , Schenectady, New York
• 1979: Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, The Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas
• 1979: Stamford Museum, Stamford, Connecticut
• 1979, 1980: Galerie Veith Turske (or Turske Fine Art), Cologne
• 1980: Books and Company, New York City
• 1980: State University College, New Paltz, New York
• 1980: Manson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New York
• 1980: Hokin Gallery, Chicago
• 1981, 1985, 1987: Turske Fine Art (or Turske & Turske), Zurich
• 1981: Martha White Gallery, Louisville, Kentucky
• 1982: Karen & Jean Bernier Gallery, Athens
• 1984: M. Knoedler, Zurich
• 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1998, 2004, 2005: Kouros Gallery, New York City
• 1985: Galerie Würthle, Vienna
• 1985: Ericson Gallery, New York City
• 1985, 1986: Harcourts Contemporary, San Francisco
• 1986, 1988: Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland
• 1987: Pierides Gallery of Modern Art, Athens
• 1988, 1989, 1990: Dorsky Gallery, New York City
• 1988: Studio d´Art Zanussi, Milan
• 1988: Museum Morsbroich , Leverkusen
• 1988: Jack Ruthbergs Fine Arts, Los Angeles
• 1988: Pascal de Sarthe Gallery, San Francisco
• 1989: Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center, Athens
• 1991–1992, 1993, 2011–2012: ACA Galleries, New York City
• 1994: Old Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki
• 1996: Hiro Gallery, Tokyo
• 1997: National Gallery , Athens
• 1997: Alexandros Soutzos Museum, Athens
• 2000: Fundación Juan March, Madrid
• 2003: Florian Sundheimer Gallery, Munich
• 2005: Crane Kalman Gallery, London
• 2008, 2010: Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York City
• 2009: Portalakis Collection, Athens

Group exhibitions and museum collections

To date, pictures by Theodoros Stamos have enriched well over 100 group exhibitions. In the United States, where most of it took place, Stamos was repeatedly involved in presentations at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Museum of Modern Art took him into account in 1958 and 1959 in the show "The New American Painting" put together for Europe. In 1968 their exhibition “Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage” traveled across the USA. Outside the USA, there have been group exhibitions with examples of his work in London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, ​​Milan, Rome, Basel, Zurich, Berlin, Athens, Toronto and Tokyo. In 1948 Stamos took part in the first post-war biennale in Venice and in 1959 in the documenta II in Kassel .

Collections of images can be found in around 50 museums worldwide. In Germany in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen in Munich and in the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen, in Austria in the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} ACA Galleries (Ed.): Theodoros Stamos. Evidence of Wonder: A Survey 1940s – 1990s . Theodoros Stamos, S. 37 ( PDF file; 3.34 MB [accessed February 23, 2016]).
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q} City of Leverkusen, Der Oberstadtdirektor, Museum Morsbroich (ed.): Theodoros Stamos. Painting from 1946 to 1987 . September 26 to November 8, 1987, Leverkusen City Museum, Morsbroich Castle. Leverkusen 1987, ISBN 3-925520-06-6 , biography, p. 70 .
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Roberta Smith: Theodoros Stamos, 74, Abstract Painter, Dies. In: nytimes.com. February 4, 1997, accessed February 23, 2016 . 
4. ↑ Ralph Pomeroy: Stamos . Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, New York 1974, ISBN 0-8109-0487-X , The Swimmer Swims, pp. 16 .
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Dieter Ronte : On the early works of Theodoros Stamos . In: City of Leverkusen, Der Oberstadtdirektor, Museum Morsbroich (Hrsg.): Theodoros Stamos. Painting from 1946 to 1987 . September 26 to November 8, 1987, Leverkusen City Museum, Morsbroich Castle. Leverkusen 1987, p. 7-13 .
6. ↑ ^{a b c d} Theodoros Stamos. Biography. (No longer available online.) In: holistaggart.com. Holis Taggart Galleries, 2013, archived from the original on February 23, 2016 ; accessed on February 23, 2016 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
7. ↑ ^{a b} Ralph Pomeroy: Stamos . Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, New York 1974, ISBN 0-8109-0487-X , Subjects, pp. 12 .
8. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Daniel Grant: The Case of Theodoros Stamos. (No longer available online.) In: artnet.com. 2010, formerly in the original ; accessed on February 23, 2016 (English).  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.    
9. ↑ Ralph Pomeroy: Stamos . Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, New York 1974, ISBN 0-8109-0487-X , Stage Fright, pp. 47 .
10. ↑ ^{a b c d} Judith H. Dobrzynski: A Betrayal the Art World Can't Forget; the Battle for Rothko's Estate Altered Lives and Reputations. In: nytimes.com. November 2, 1998, accessed February 23, 2016 . 
11. ^ Theodoros Stamos. * 1922 New York † 1997 Ioannina (Greece). In: kettererkunst.de. Retrieved February 23, 2016 . 
12. ↑ S. National Academicians. Past Academicians. (No longer available online.) In: nationalacademy.org. National Academy Museum, archived from the original on March 20, 2016 ; accessed on February 23, 2016 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
13. ↑ Ralph Pomeroy: Stamos . Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, New York 1974, ISBN 0-8109-0487-X , Being n, pp. 50 .
14. ↑ ^{a b c d} Herbert Schneidler: Notes on the artistic work of Theodoros Stamos . In: City of Leverkusen, Der Oberstadtdirektor, Museum Morsbroich (Hrsg.): Theodoros Stamos. Painting from 1946 to 1987 . September 26 to November 8, 1987, Leverkusen City Museum, Morsbroich Castle. Leverkusen 1987, p. 15-18 .
15. ↑ ^{a b} Theodoros Stamos. Biography. In: artsy.net. Retrieved February 23, 2016 . 
16. ↑ Ralph Pomeroy: Stamos . Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, New York 1974, ISBN 0-8109-0487-X , Being In, pp. 48 .
17. ^ ACA Galleries (Ed.): Theodoros Stamos. Evidence of Wonder: A Survey 1940s – 1990s . Chronology, S. 40 ff . ( PDF file; 3.34 MB [accessed February 23, 2016]).

Web links

• Materials by and about Theodoros Stamos in the documenta archive