Happy Holidays Corfu Magazine
Articles and Features (published quarterly) about Corfu and its many attractions
Corfu Muse - Theodoros Stamos - Retrospective
Vol. 2, No. 1; September 15, 2006
© 2005-2006 Happy Holidays Corfu
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In 1975 Theodoros Stamos donated 45 works to the National Gallery of Athens which show how his creative work evolved down through the years.
In 1936, at the age of fourteen, Stamos began to attend night school, taking lessons in sculpture over a four-year period at the School for American Artists, but from then on he gave his full attention to painting; in this discipline he was largely self-taught.
His early works are dated from 1942-1943 and are characterized by a figurative and anti-naturalistic rendering of the theme, a style marked by freshness and ingenuousness.
Between 1954 and 1963 Stamos created his Color Fields. The empty abstract space that artists such as Rothko, Newman and Styl had been exploring since 1947 now began to bear fruit for Stamos as well. In this series of paintings color itself occupies the primary space, marked by the use of an intense gestural style. Furthermore, the expressionistic element used in the rendering predominates, sometimes with a strong conjoining of large color areas, other times through the verticle trisection of the painting surface.
Under the general title Sun Boxes (1963-1970), the artist started out by using a muted tonal palette and a variety of shades of white, which he incorporated into rectangular or nearly square shapes, expanding the painting surface over a large area, while at the same time placing the horizon in an enigmatic manner. As time passed the muted gradations of white were replaced with blue, green, mauve and fuchsia, homogeneous with the texture of the particular color area.
1963: Stamos begins Sun Boxes series; 1966: Visiting professor at University of Columbia; 1968: Archives of American Art enlist Stamos in their Program of Oral History; 1970: After the suicide of his friend Mark Rothko, Stamos relocated to Lefkada; 1971: Stamos and co-executors of Rothko's estate are sued by Kate Rothko for selling 100 Rothko canvases to the Marlborough Gallery at reduced prices; 1972: One man show at Marlborough Gallery in New York; 1974: First one man show in Greece at Athens Art Gallery; 1975: Donates 45 works to the National Gallery and Alexandros Soutzos Museum in Athens; 1977: one man show at Meisel Gallery in New York; 1980-85: Creates two important Infinity Field series; 1989-1994: Creates final Infinity Field series; 1997: Stamos dies at Ioaninna Hospital after a long illness.
