Oil on canvas, 1953. 1520x560 mm; 59 3/4x22 inches. Signed in pencil on the center stretcher.
Ex-collection André Emmerich Gallery, New York; Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York; M. Knoedler AG, Zurich, with the labels on the stretcher bars; private collection, Switzerland.
Exhibited "Theodoros Stamos: Works from 1945 to 1984," M. Knoedler AG, Zurich, 1984, number 22 (illustrated page 97).
Stamos (1922-1997), born in Manhattan's Lower East Side to Greek immigrants, famously posed with his fellow first-generation Abstract Expressionists, James Brooks, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell (and others), in the 1950 issue of Life magazine. This issue referred to the group as "The Eighteen Irascibles" because of their protest of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's policy towards American painting in the 1940s. Though not as widely known among the Abstract Expressionists, Stamos operated in a similar manner using earth-toned paints that suggest biomorphic imagery in his large-scale paintings.
On the occasion of Stamos' 1947 exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, coming just several years before this important oil, Barnett Newman wrote in the catalogue introduction: "His ideographs capture the moment of totemic affinity . . . the pastoral experience as one of participation with the inner life of the natural phenomenon."
