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THEODOROS STAMOS Untitled.
Watercolor and brush and black ink and wash on light tan wove paper, 1949. 315x240 mm; 12 1/2x9 1/2 inches. Signed and dated in black ink, lower left recto.
Theodoros Stamos (1922-1997), born in Manhattan's Lower East Side to Greek immigrants, famously posed with his fellow first-generation Abstract Expressionists in the 1950 issue of Life magazine, which 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 two years before the present watercolor, Barnett Newman wrote in the introduction: "His ideographs capture the moment of totemic affinity...the pastoral experience as one of participation with the inner life of the natural phenomenon."
