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Hollis Taggart
Theodoros Stamos
Pass of Thermophylae
39 3/4 x 24 3/4 in. (101 x 62.9 cm)
description
The biographical roots of Theodoros Stamos (1922-1997) in both Greece and Manhattan profoundly influenced the artist’s output. Along with many of his first-generation Abstract Expressionist colleagues, Stamos was deeply interested in natural history and mythological imagery. His exceptional talent as a painter and his evolution of style placed the artist as a bridge between the New York School’s first and second generations. His age, in particular, afforded him this unique position, as he was the youngest member of the “Irascibles,” the core group of fifteen New York School painters publicized by Nina Leen’s 1951 photograph in the popular postwar magazine Life.
Influenced early by Arthur Dove and his lyrical vision of nature, Stamos was notable for his use of color to document emotional responses to light and mood. A lifelong traveler and student of Hellenistic culture, Stamos began exploring in the mid-1940s soft-edged organic shapes, reminiscent of Milton Avery’s works, combined with a sense of muffled light. This is best exemplified in this evocative early work Pass of Thermophylae, created in 1949. Though its title refers to the storied Thermopylae, a narrow pass and the site of a battle between Spartans and the invading Persian forces (Stamos’s mother hailed from Sparta), the painting itself features a fossil-like, biomorphic form against an oneiric background. This work was created shortly after his 1946 painting Sounds in the Rock–which similarly played with mytho-geological forms–was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, becoming his first work to be collected by a museum and cementing his reputation in avant-garde circles.
Two years before Pass of Thermophylae, Barnett Newman wrote a catalogue essay for Stamos’ solo exhibition with Betty Parsons in 1947, in which he deftly captured Stamos’ keen sense of the natural world: “The work of Theodoros Stamos, subtle and sensuous as it is, reveals an attitude toward nature that is closer to true communion. His ideographs capture the moment of totemic affinity with the rock and the mushroom, the crayfish and the seaweed. He redefined the pastoral experience as one of participation with the inner life of the natural phenomenon. One might say that instead of going into the rock, he comes out of it.” (1)
Indeed, during the 1940s, Stamos frequently spoke about “painting from inside the rock” to express his imaginative identification with geological discoveries that became especially widespread in the 1930s and 1940s. Like many of his 1940s works, Pass of Thermopylae, with its intense blue hues, seems to explore the origins of life in an undersea environment. “In addition to the general notion of life beginning in the sea, study of the ocean and its evolutionary role was an important area of scientific study during the 1940s. Due to World War II, there was a new emphasis on mapping the ocean floor for submarine warfare. . . Stamos himself avidly collected items from the shore during summer visits to the ocean.” (2) Stamos was a voracious reader in the history of evolution and natural theology, the latter which investigated the natural world while retaining its essential mystery and ambiguity (William Buckland was a key writer of natural theology whose writing was important to Stamos). For Stamos, writes art historian Robert Mattison, “the dynamism, morphology, and elemental rhythms of nature provided essential inspiration, and his works embody the flow and pulse of the natural world.” (3) An artist interested in the deepest recesses of the history of life, as well as the transcendent elements of nature, Stamos relentlessly continued, until his death, to seek in painting a universal language and inner vision.
Stamos’s art is held in dozens of public collections in the United States and internationally, among them the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo d’Arte Moderno, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Picture Gallery, Athens, Greece; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tel Aviv Museum, Israel; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Wilheim-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany.
1. Barnett Newman, “Stamos” in Theodoros Stamos (New York: Wakefield Gallery, 1947).
2. Robert S. Mattison, “Theodoros Stamos: A Communion with Nature,” Hollis Taggart Galleries, 21.
3. Mattison, 18.
Influenced early by Arthur Dove and his lyrical vision of nature, Stamos was notable for his use of color to document emotional responses to light and mood. A lifelong traveler and student of Hellenistic culture, Stamos began exploring in the mid-1940s soft-edged organic shapes, reminiscent of Milton Avery’s works, combined with a sense of muffled light. This is best exemplified in this evocative early work Pass of Thermophylae, created in 1949. Though its title refers to the storied Thermopylae, a narrow pass and the site of a battle between Spartans and the invading Persian forces (Stamos’s mother hailed from Sparta), the painting itself features a fossil-like, biomorphic form against an oneiric background. This work was created shortly after his 1946 painting Sounds in the Rock–which similarly played with mytho-geological forms–was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, becoming his first work to be collected by a museum and cementing his reputation in avant-garde circles.
Two years before Pass of Thermophylae, Barnett Newman wrote a catalogue essay for Stamos’ solo exhibition with Betty Parsons in 1947, in which he deftly captured Stamos’ keen sense of the natural world: “The work of Theodoros Stamos, subtle and sensuous as it is, reveals an attitude toward nature that is closer to true communion. His ideographs capture the moment of totemic affinity with the rock and the mushroom, the crayfish and the seaweed. He redefined the pastoral experience as one of participation with the inner life of the natural phenomenon. One might say that instead of going into the rock, he comes out of it.” (1)
Indeed, during the 1940s, Stamos frequently spoke about “painting from inside the rock” to express his imaginative identification with geological discoveries that became especially widespread in the 1930s and 1940s. Like many of his 1940s works, Pass of Thermopylae, with its intense blue hues, seems to explore the origins of life in an undersea environment. “In addition to the general notion of life beginning in the sea, study of the ocean and its evolutionary role was an important area of scientific study during the 1940s. Due to World War II, there was a new emphasis on mapping the ocean floor for submarine warfare. . . Stamos himself avidly collected items from the shore during summer visits to the ocean.” (2) Stamos was a voracious reader in the history of evolution and natural theology, the latter which investigated the natural world while retaining its essential mystery and ambiguity (William Buckland was a key writer of natural theology whose writing was important to Stamos). For Stamos, writes art historian Robert Mattison, “the dynamism, morphology, and elemental rhythms of nature provided essential inspiration, and his works embody the flow and pulse of the natural world.” (3) An artist interested in the deepest recesses of the history of life, as well as the transcendent elements of nature, Stamos relentlessly continued, until his death, to seek in painting a universal language and inner vision.
Stamos’s art is held in dozens of public collections in the United States and internationally, among them the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo d’Arte Moderno, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Picture Gallery, Athens, Greece; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tel Aviv Museum, Israel; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Wilheim-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany.
1. Barnett Newman, “Stamos” in Theodoros Stamos (New York: Wakefield Gallery, 1947).
2. Robert S. Mattison, “Theodoros Stamos: A Communion with Nature,” Hollis Taggart Galleries, 21.
3. Mattison, 18.
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