Chronological Biography, Bibliography and Exhibitions 1922 Born on December 31 on East 18th Street, New York City. The fourth of six children of Greek immigrant parents. Stamos’s mother, Stamatata came from Sparta. His father, Theodoros came from the mountains north of the Island of Lefkada in the Ionian Sea. His father had been a fisherman in Greece before Stamos was born, and for many years thereafter he ran a small hat cleaning and shoe shine shop off St Mark’s Place in Lower Manhattan. 1930 Stamos ruptures spleen as a result of a fall, and it is removed. While recuperating he begins to draw.
1944 One-man Exhibition Mortimer Brandt Gallery, New York City, February. 1945 Group Exhibitions Mortimer Brandt Gallery, “Paintings by John Graham, David Hill, Theodoros Stamos, Hedda Sterne”, May 5-29. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, “1945 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting”.
1936 Attends Peter Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan; awarded a scholarship to The American Artists’ School as the result of some drawings.
Collector, Edward Root, purchases Stamos’s “Movement of Plants” (1945), exhibited in The Whitney Museum Annual Exhibition, the first of thirty-two paintings by Stamos purchased by Root, which are now at The Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica, New York.
1937 Stamos meets Joseph Solman, member of the artists’ group called “The Ten” Solman encourages Stamos to begin painting at home and also directs him to visit Alfred Steiglitz’s gallery, where Stamos sees paintings by Milton Avery and Arthur Dove.
1946 Group Exhibitions Mortimer Brandt Gallery, “Paintings by Stamos”, April 1-20.
1939 Three months before graduation, Stamos leaves Stuyvesant High School. He drops sculpture, partly because of financial difficulties and space, and he paints in shared studios around 10th Street. For the next two years he supports himself by working as a florist, hat blocker, printer, prism maker, caster, enamel polisher and book salesman. 1941 Begins running small frame shop on East 18th Street, which he continues to do until 1948. Meets Arshile Gorky, Fernand Leger and other artists in shop. Frames a large number of Paul Klee’s works for the Karl Nierendorf Gallery. 1943 Stamos’s first one-man exhibition, Wakefield Gallery/ Bookshop run by Betty Parsons, November 29-December 11. Meets Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman.
Whitney Museum of American Art “1946 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting”. The Betty Parsons Gallery opens in September, including the works of Stamos, Newman, Pollock, Rothko and Still. First museum purchase, “Sounds in the Rock” (1946), by The Museum of Modern Art, N.Y. 1947 One-man Exhibition Betty Parsons Gallery, February 10-March 1, introductory essay by B. B. Newman. Group Exhibitions Betty Parsons Gallery “The Ideographic Picture”, paintings by Hans Hofmann, Pietro Lazzari, Boris Margo, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Theodoros Stamos, Clyfford Still. Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, “Paintings in the United States, 1947”, October 9-December 7.