Theodoros Stamos: Contemplations on the Universal

THEODOROS STAMOS: CONTEMPLATIONS ON THE UNIVERSAL

HOLLI S TAG GART GALLER I ES

Theodoros Stamos: Contemplations on the Universal

Theodoros Stamos: Contemplations on the Universal 26 January to 4 March 2017 Essay by Jeffrey Grove

HOLLI S TAG GART GALLER I ES 521 W 26th Street 7th Floor New York, NY 10001

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Foreword

Theodoros Stamos’ emergence onto the New York art scene at the youthful age of twenty-one took place at a definitive moment in the history of American art. Having been given his first solo show by legendary gallerist Betty Parsons, he occupied a core position at the nexus of the burgeoning Abstract Expressionist movement. As the youngest member of the ‘Irascibles’—the fifteen artists immortalized in Nina Leen’s 1951 photograph in Life magazine—his foray into the art world was indeed remarkable for its great critical and commercial acclaim. He was to enjoy a career that spanned more than five decades, spending much time in Greece, a landscape that reinforced his connection to his classical heritage and that fueled his affinity to atmospheric light and color.

Our gallery has long been committed to Stamos’ legacy, organizing two previous solo exhibitions and including the artist’s work in various thematic shows over the years. Theodoros Stamos: Contemplations on the Universal distinguishes itself by presenting a retrospective analysis of a long career. His paintings, rooted soundly in the traditions of the first-generation of Abstract Expressionism, have a transcendence that captures universal truths about nature and the cosmos, while incorporating resonant archetypes of the human experience. This survey offers intriguing biomorphic compositions from the 1940s, stunning, layered paintings from the 1960s, and luminous color-field works from the 1970s. Stamos was an artist of great introspection, an erudite intellect and intrepid traveler who created a thoughtful and varied oeuvre characterized by masterful technique and originality for which we are thrilled to provide a forum.

We thank Jeffrey Grove for his nuanced and insightful essay, offering a guiding hand through the intricacies of Stamos’ fruitful career. His essay provides an in-depth analysis of pivotal works within the exhibition, identifying with great clarity the artistic shifts, decisive experiences, and definitive influences that shaped the path of Stamos’ work. Our continued appreciation is offered to the artist’s sister, Gina Savas and her son, Jason Savas, who are steadfast custodians of Stamos’ legacy and who generously shared their archival photographs to present in this catalogue. For all of their individual contributions with this project, we acknowledge Kara Spellman, Stan Charnin, Savannah Downs, and our meticulous exhibition coordinator, Ashley Park. Thanks go to our very gifted designer, Russell Hassell, and to Robert Nangle and his staff at Meridian Printing.

Debra Pesci Martin Friedrichs

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Theodoros Stamos, Greece, Fall 1947. Courtesy of the Theodoros Stamos Estate

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Theodoros Stamos

By Jeffrey Grove

Theodoros Stamos was a precocious artist. Just thirteen years old when he received a scholarship to the American Artists’ School in New York to study sculpture, this largely self-taught artist was only twenty-one when Betty Parsons gave him his first one-person show at Wakefield Gallery and Bookshop.

Parsons, who had one of the best eyes for talent at the time, noted the “sense of natural forces” Stamos possessed, “and his ability to translate this perception into painterly expression.” 1 His auspicious debut with Parsons and subsequent exhibitions drew positive attention from some of the most important artists and tastemakers of the day. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Stamos was critically lauded and commercially successful.

At age thirty-six, Stamos was the subject of a career retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery, in Washington, D.C. Kenneth Sawyer, art critic for the Baltimore Sun noted in his introduction to the catalogue that Stamos, “at the age when most painters are scarcely more than advanced students . . . was exhibiting at one of New York’s most influential galleries, his work being acquired by the nation’s foremost museums and collectors.” 2 An art world insider and a prodigious talent, Stamos was the youngest of the original first-generation abstract expressionists and lived to enjoy one of the longest careers of any artist affiliated with that movement. Given his early promise and prominence in the field, Stamos’ career took unpredictable turns, and in subsequent decades his work came to occupy a peripheral position in the consciousness of many audiences.

Sidelined, and at times maligned in the popular discourse—his style was variously described as “borrowed” and “piquant”—Stamos and his work were often dismissed, overlooked, or blatantly misconstrued. 3 The vicissitudes of his career provide a relevant parable for countless contemporary artists working today who have, particularly in recent years, witnessed the trajectory of their and their peers’ careers peak and

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Theodoros Stamos, 1958.

Black and white photographic print on board; 20 x 26 cm. Courtesy of the Theodoros Stamos papers, 1922–2007, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

ebb within the space of a few short years. Now, however, some twenty years following his death in 1997, a new generation of art historians, curators, critics, and collectors are re-discovering what was often previously overlooked in Stamos: the integrity, originality, growth, and maturity of an uncompromising artist’s vision.

For all his early success and easy access to the leading figures in the art world, Stamos always remained a bit of an outsider. A city boy with a taste for the seashore, Stamos was in his person and art someone constantly in search of equilibrium. Intensely private and a lifelong bachelor, Stamos, for instance settled in what was then the hinterlands of Long Island on the North Shore while his artistic peers, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Conrad Marca-Relli, and Esteban Vicente, among others, flocked to the opposite, East End. From 1972 until his death, Stamos lived more than half of each year in Greece. And while many of his fellow firstgeneration abstract expressionist painters, like his close friend Mark Rothko, were first-generation European émigrés, Stamos was born and reared in New York City.

Countenancing the reality of the natural world while attempting to image the transcendent possibilities of abstraction, Stamos strived to achieve in his work a quality that his friend Barnett Newman, writing in 1947, characterized as “true communion.”4 Stamos’ artistic peregrinations throughout the decades reflect his search, and the works in this exhibition trace its path. Two key bodies of work bracket this group of paintings and drawings: a choice group of paintings from 1949, and a focused selection of paintings and works on paper from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. These and other works drawn from the intervening decades survey and reveal Stamos’ artistic ethos, including his abiding interests in literature and travel and his commitment to friendships and relationships, while exploring the patronage of supporters that sustained him at various points in his life.

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Stamos’ auspicious beginnings in the New York art world attracted a phenomenal amount of attention, including sales to prominent museums and private collections. The work that he was creating in the early-to-mid 1940s manifested interests and shared vaguely similar visual vocabularies with artistic peers that include William Baziotes, Rothko, and Pollock. Each of these artists were producing work that has been variously described as “ideographic” and “biomorphic,” exploring anthropological connections and psychological states in an attempt to envisage the collective unconscious through the depiction of mythic and archetypal images. 5 Among the earliest works in this exhibition, Farewell, 1946, demonstrates the manner in which these tendencies informed Stamos’ ethos (pl. 1). His chosen media—watercolor and ink on paper—visually support the vaguely aquatic environment he has populated with biomorphic, amoebic organisms.

A strong horizontal line separates the underworld from the upper, an atmosphere punctuated by a tendril-like form reaching for another plane. Semiotically the term “Farewell” in this instance may not refer to the action of expressing goodbye to a friend, but rather the desire to realize a final act of escape.

Indeed, within a few years, Stamos’ lyrical typology of organic abstraction began to give way, and one sees a pronounced shift away from the representations of states that might be characterized as vaguely surreal to a language of abstraction that, while still clearly suggestive of other states of being, becomes more concrete in referent and image.

Five works in the exhibition dated 1949 emblematize this new direction. Entitled A Day, In Venice, Mistra, Three Kings, and Tracery, each work is painted with oil on Masonite, Stamos’ favored substrate at the time both due to its affordability and the way in which its surface enhanced the atmospheric quality of his media. These works from 1949 reflect an independent stance, signaling Stamos’ progression from previous cycles of work, and their descriptive titles offer evidence that Stamos was beginning to address more directly referents from the natural world. It is relevant to the discussion of these works to note that in the fall and winter of 1948-49, Stamos traveled with his friend Robert Price to Europe for the first time, taking a six-month trip that included visits to France, Italy, and his ancestral homeland, Greece. Works such as In Venice and Mistra likely refer to impressions of landscapes and scenarios he witnessed on that adventure.

Whereas Stamos’ earlier work was often calligraphic in nature, In Venice is distinguished by its representational as well as pictographic quality (pl. 7). In the lower right quadrant of the painting, the etched lines clearly equate as a human figure. Elsewhere, conjuring the slippery, misty light that enshrouds Venice much of the year, Stamos used thinly applied washes of silvery greys and metallic tones to capture the tone of Venice’s particular light. In Venice is further distinguished by an economy of means and delicate figure ground relationships. Although modest in scale, the work prefigures a type of painting featuring a spare field of color with minimal “writing” that we come to see expressed on a grander scale in Stamos’ later works, which he referred to as “Field.”

Mistra, another painting that likely recalls Stamos’ impressions of a site he visited on that trip, is a more complex composition (pl. 6). “Mystras” or “Mystra” is a fortress town in the Peloponnesus that served as the capital of the Byzantine Despotate of the Morea in the 14th and 15th centuries.

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FIG 1 Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy, The Three Wise Men (Named Balthasar, Melchior, and Gaspar). Detail from Mary and Child, Surrounded by Angels, 6th century AD. Photo by Nina Aldin Thune

A medieval ruin abandoned in 1832, its desolate beauty must have captivated Stamos when he and Price discovered it. Again using oil paint thinned and applied in glazes to approximate the liquidity of watercolor, Stamos constructed an architectonic composition of strong verticals, horizontals, and arcs that describe, however abstractly, the ancient ruin, while powdery whites, blues, and pinks suggest the bright light and stark contrasts of the Grecian sky. What one may initially take to be a visual references to palace architecture—circular and rectangular shapes capped by arch-like forms—might also be suggestive of two figural apparitions, a smaller and larger body standing near one another.

Tracery (pl. 8) and Three Kings (pl. 5), two other paintings from the 1949 group, further suggest that Stamos was imaginatively constructing abstract arrangements to imply figural compositions. While it is hard to say which came first, the title or the painting (there is evidence that Stamos usually titled a work after its completion), it is probable that a work such as Three Kings had a concrete reference. The title surely refers to the New Testament story of the Virgin birth, at which three Magi or Wise Men were in attendance. The narrative is ubiquitous in Christian visual culture and it is probable that Stamos would have seen mosaics similar to the one in the Basilica of Sant’Apolinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy, during his trip (fig 1). Comprising a visually related, if structurally divergent bookend to Farewell from three years earlier, here we see Stamos again inserting a strong horizontal to bifurcate space into foreground and background, positioning three “personages” along the way to imply a processional movement.

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A similar idea of progression is implied in a larger work from 1948, titled Migration (pl. 3). The glyphic, dark form that structures Migration conjures associations with any number of pictographic forms of writing. Indeed, Stamos was an avid student of ancient cultures and universal forms of communication. From the mid-1940s onward, he became increasingly interested in the art and history of China and Japan and began to incorporate Eastern sensibilities into his artistic approach. In his 1954 lecture “Why Nature In Art?,” given at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., he explained the relevance of Eastern culture for contemporary artists, a fascination he shared with fellow Abstract Expressionists Rothko, Newman, Motherwell, and Clyfford Still. In his lecture, Stamos stated that “things are created by the mind,” and that, “Although I am drawn to nature by certain eternal qualities or forces, and I go through a subjective phase, in my painting my purpose and the end result is closer to the objective expression.6 Moving into the 1950s, Stamos’ work acquired a more sober palette. Influenced by Eastern aesthetics, Stamos created paintings he referred to as the Tea House series, works that had a much stronger architectonic language of interlocking horizontal and vertical patterns. Espousing a philosophy perhaps tinged by his studies in Eastern aesthetics, Stamos wrote in a 1953 that, “today more and more American painters are realizing the value of thought, contemplation and quietness as prerequisites for creating.” In his own search for a language of quietude, by the late 1950s and early 1960s Stamos’ work had evolved physically not only in terms of scale, but also philosophically in terms of how he viewed the practice of painting as an extension of the interior self. In 1956 Stamos observed that, “in the last analysis, painting at its best consists of truth to one’s paint, to one’s self and one’s time.” 7 Three years later, for a statement contributed to It Is, an artist’s magazine published in 1959, Stamos expanded upon the way his approach to tackling the canvas may have shifted since he first began making paintings in the early 1940s.

At the moment, I am concerned with an image that will expand and excite the eye, even secure it.

I want the painting to be sensuous, living on its own, devoid of biography and, if vulgar, all right. . . .

This is not to say I am off the nature “kick”; instead, through nature, this is my discovery: happiness, even joy, at finding something, which I want to look at. . . . So, it is the eye and the paint—paint on canvas—with which I am involved, allowing the paint to have a chance and achieving a harmony between the two. 8 Stamos may have been intimating that his physiological engagement with the action of painting and the physical the act of painting was now taking precedence over the psychological implications that may have previously directed his creative forces. In another section of “Why Nature in Art?,” Stamos had spoken with reverence regarding the American artists whom he felt conveyed emotion and spirituality through direct experience with nature, citing the Hudson River School Painters, Arthur Dove, and Mark Rothko. By the early 1960s however, Stamos appears to have shifted gears, growing increasingly committed to eliminating any vestige of naturalism in his painting and focusing primarily on the properties of paint itself and the process of painting. Supporting this notion, Stamos remarked in 1965, “the great figurative painters were involved with grandeur of vision, using the figure as a means to an end, whereas

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today the best of the abstract painters are also involved with a grandeur of vision using color as their means toward a new space-light.” 9 This distillation, nascent in the “Field” paintings of the 1950s, came more sharply into focus with a new series initiated in the 1960s, the Sun Box paintings. Three works in this exhibition provide a concise survey of the almost astounding array of patterns, forms, and attitudes Stamos coaxed from the Sun-Box construct: singular squares and rectangles or small groups of geometric forms hovering over a field of color, weighted, bisected, and defined by horizontal bands. Corinthian Sun-Box I, 1969, for instance is painted in a muted, even muddy palette of earthy tones, but enlivened by a juicy pink band bisecting it in the upper third partition (pl. 18). Olympia Sun-Box, on the other hand, evokes the crisp clarity of a Grecian landscape with its great expanse of unpainted white canvas (pl. 17). The yellow and orange bands bisecting the uppermost section of the canvas, tonalities suggestive of sun and flowers, are offset by a darker, brownish void hovering below them, a form perhaps suggesting the classic domestic architecture found in Greek villages, crisp white facades punctuated by open windows and doorways.

In the critical discourse, Stamos was rarely interviewed and when he was, the artist often seemed at pains to explain his work, not for an unwillingness to cooperate, but rather for what appears to be his disinclination to assign overt “meaning” to his work. In one of the lengthiest interviews that he ever agreed to, conducted over the course of three days in 1968 with Irving Sander and recorded for the Archives of American Art, Stamos rarely, if ever, discusses his intention. Still, Stamos occasionally gave in to self-analysis and in the first monograph devoted to his work, published in 1975, he discussed the genesis of the Sun-Box motif.

You see, what I think I’ve been doing is, really, pulling up all the resources of twenty-five years and applying them to the new format and the new—I hate the word “image”—the new image that I’ve been working on for the last six or seven years. So consequently, I feel the edges have become less brutal, but “brutal” with quotation marks—I was never brutal. . . . After pulling up the resources, they’ve become much more elegant, much more subtle, and do hark back to the forties—and the fifties—in terms of certain lines, certain shapes. 10 One of the more dynamic yet “elegant“ works from this series, Homage to Pierre Bonnard, 1965 (pl. 14), is part of a larger series Stamos dedicated in “Homage to Pierre Bonnard.” Bonnard, a PostImpressionist noted for his vibrant use of color and the highly narrative, often autobiographical nature of his work picturing domestic interiors and verdant gardens may, at a glance, appear to be a less likely source of inspiration to Stamos than even the Hudson River School painters (fig. 2). But in a 1968 interview with Irving Sandler, Stamos proclaimed, “Oh, I love Matisse. And I love Bonnard. I love Vuillard.

After all the years of working, in the end they’ve all exerted an influence on me.” 11 Despite the lack of any overt formal resemblances in his work to that of those artists, it of course makes sense that Stamos would admire these French sensualists. Temperamentally, he was aligned with their love of nature, fiercely independent visions, and shared dedication to creating work that was, at the time of its production, often at odds with prevailing trends.

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FIG 2 Pierre Bonnard, L' été, 1917, oil on canvas, 90 ½ x 133 ⅞ inches. Image courtesy of the Archives Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence, France

The Sun Box paintings are the most formal, if not austere, paintings Stamos ever produced. Despite their classical structures, however, these paintings are far from rigid. They are not “hard-edged” in the manner of the crisply painted works being produced by contemporaneous artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, nor are they loosely amorphous or decoratively patterned, as were the paintings of Jules Olitski and Larry Poons, respectively, at this time. Instead, the contrasting planes and bands of color in Stamos’ paintings are built upon multiple layers of delicate strokes that imbue the paintings with a degree of delicacy and sensuousness: they feel more emotional as opposed to intellectual.

Although technical precision was key to Stamos’ production, the theory behind his paintings was not a primary concern he felt compelled to communicate.

In 1970, Stamos suffered a devastating loss with the suicide of his closest friend, Mark Rothko.

Seeking solace, perhaps just escape, Stamos made his second pilgrimage to Greece that year, a visit that became a defining experience in his life. On that trip he connected with his extended family and decided to make the island of Lefkada, his father’s hometown, his own second home, and from 1972 onward Stamos spent at least half of each year there. Experiencing Lefkada appears to have clarified and intensified Stamos’ priorities as a painter. During the summer of 1970, while in Lefkada, Stamos began to paint his Infinity Fields series, a body of work that would preoccupy him for the next two decades.

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One of the more striking paintings in this series, Infinity Field, Marathon, 1971, typifies the clarity and simplicity Stamos seemed to have been striving for in the earliest Infinity Fields (pl. 21). At 80 x 40 inches, this emphatically vertical painting seems intended to relate to the viewer assertively on a human level: one’s body must “confront” the painting because of its scale. A thin, staff-like shape in the right quarter of the painting suggests a figure, encouraging the proposition that this painting is intended to initiate a more intimate dialogue between the indescribable subject of the work and the memories, feelings, and experiences the viewer brings to their encounter. The painting is constructed by multiple applications of thin veils of white pigment containing many colors woven through it, producing a softly shimmering surface. The cool white glow, rather than emulating the harsh white of chilly snow or hard stone, is warm and enveloping.

Artists throughout the centuries have used white as a potent vehicle for translating meaning in their work, whether it is intended as a clarifying agent of the artist’s intention, or a romantic representation of artistic struggle. For Stamos, the judicious deployment of white in his paintings had been standard practice for years, whether it invovled exposing large expanses of the unprimed canvas, or making its color (or absence of color) one of the primary consitutents of his compositions. In a statement published in 1971, the year Infinity Field, Marathon was produced, Stamos explained that, “Through my experiences I have learned that it is possible for color to give off light. Therefore, the reverse is also true; for colors to absorb light. The ‘Infinity Series,’ which are built as structures, strive for both possibilities.” 12 These remarks, and the increasing confidence with the complexities of pigment Stamos revealed as the Infinity series progressed, indicate that the artist may have been achieving what one might consider a more “universal” connection in his art, a visual manifestation of his own spiritual connection to Greece. In one of the earliest lengthy texts devoted to Stamos’ work, the poet Kenneth Sawyer observed in 1960 that, It was in Greece that Stamos recaptured the spirit of the Mysteries, the Pantheism of his childhood; it was there, too, in the silver light of the Aegean, that the love for clear, vibrant color was fully awakened. It is amusing to note that subsequently his synonym for whatever was clear, warm, or brilliant was ‘Greek.’ 13 This exhibition includes six important works from the Infinity Fields, Lefkada Series, three works on paper and three major canvasses, and these may more fully express Stamos’ desire to explore the expressive qualities of clear, vibrant color in his work that was awakened in Greece. Dating primarily from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, these works reflect a subtle but profound shift to a mature style that would inform Stamos’ subsequent production and evince qualities that, like in his earliest pictographic pictures from the 1940s, engage a consistent symbolic language that seems gauged to relate to viewers on a universal, rather than specific, terrain.

In his earlier paintings from this series, such as Infinity Field—Lefkada Series, 1976, the paintings possess more lively surfaces and softer palettes (pl. 23). Just a few years later, his paintings, including Infinity Field, Lefkada Series, For Caspar David Friedrich, 1980-81, become darker, richer, more sober and less playful than previous iterations in the cycle (pl. 27). At the same time, these rich colors—Stamos

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FIG 3 Caspar David Friedrich, Winter Landscape, probably 1811, oil on canvas, 12 ¾ x 17 ¾ inches. Image copyright © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY

now seemed to revel in the application and juxtaposition of difficult to calibrate hues including deep purples, heavily saturated blues, and vibrant orange-reds—may be reflective of a more serious turn in the artist’s thinking and worldview.

Introspection is easier to trace through figural painting, and artists in their maturity often turn to self-portraiture as a means to express their shifting perspective and transition to mature age. With abstraction however, the means are much more limited, and more subtly deployed. In a 1984 essay devoted to Stamos’ work from recent years, which addressed pictures of the Lefkada Series from this period, Theodore F. Wolff stated his belief that “If [Stamos’] early work of the 1940s was about beginnings, about deeply interior stirrings and movements toward life, then his work of the past nine or ten years has been about realizations and resolutions…. and about the ultimate need for a reconciliations between life and death.” 14 As previously noted, titles served Stamos literally and symbolically, and in 1980, he began to subtitle a series of the Infinity Fields “For Caspar David Friedrich.” Recognized as the leading German Romantic painter of his time, Friedrich was initially rejected and subsequently widely praised for his brooding, allegorical landscapes that expressed, visually, a belief that states of spirituality were achieved through the contemplation of nature. Friedrich’s melancholy works convey a sense of human frailty and the Sublime power of nature to reflect one’s inadequacy in the face of God (fig. 3). Stamos’ recognition of Friedrich as an avatar in his own work perhaps acknowledges his own feelings of vulnerability at this time or recognizes the sense of awe in nature that he was trying to capture in his carefully modulated, dark pictures.

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While his earlier paintings seem drenched in the colors of the sea and sky, many of Stamos’ paintings from this period appear to burrow beneath the surface, exploring seismic or subterranean states of consciousness. In an insightful essay published in 1988, art historian Sam Hunter noted how, in Stamos’ work, Finely articulated surfaces and slow-moving brushstrokes suspend and visibly prolong the painting gesture, creating strongly felt, if abstract metaphors for doubt and introspection, disquiet and calm through the sensitive elaboration of signs on the surfaces, and through the pictorial form of his evanescent painting fields. 15 Hunter was writing generally with regard to Stamos’ work, yet this observation seems especially pertinent to a consideration of the paintings from 1980 onward. Beginning in the early 1970s, Stamos enjoyed a more vigorous reception in Europe than in the United States, and his life in Greece and international travels continued to be powerful influences. In 1983 he traveled to Jerusalem with his cousin Theodosis to whom he had grown close during his time living in Lefkada. The visit had a profound influence. Stamos was likely affected, as many visitors to Jerusalem are, by the intersecting dialects, the clashing and lively religious cultures, the weight of the city’s history, and the palpable power of symbol, both in written texts and religious icons. That same year, Stamos began to produce works in the Infinity Series to which he appended the further title Jerusalem Series, as with Infinity Field, Jerusalem Series VI, 1984–5, (pl. 29).

The defining characteristic of this new series was the introduction of a visual language that recalls his biomorphic works from the 1940s. Instead of the scumbled fields of color that typfied the Infinity Series, Stamos punctuated the fields of his Jerusalem Series with elaborate webs of calligraphic marks.

Comprising cuniform and hieroglyphic shapes, they suggest unknowable languages that tempt the viewer to assume a universal understanding that might unlock the key to their meaning. These works appealed in particular to Stamos’ European collectors, a number of whom had gathered together to form a group called “The Circle of Friends of Theodoros Stamos.“ Largely through the efforts of Veith Turske, who represented Stamos throughout the 1980s, collectors in Zurich and Cologne in particular became captivated by Stamos and his work. They spent time with the artist, both in Germany and in Greece, and collected his work in depth.

One of these collectors, from whom six of the works in this exhibition are on loan, ammassed a collection of forty-three works by the artist during his lifetime. Struck by Stamos’ sympathetic nature, deep intelligence, and artistic capabilites, this collector commissioned Stamos to create two grand paintings to appoint the entrance to a new headquarters he was building for his company in Cologne. Although Stamos had created larger-scale textiles for public spaces before, these were his first, and last, monumental paintings. With the assistance of his cousin from Lefkada, Stamos executed the two acrylic on canvas paintings in situ, working on the floor, and then installed each 181 x 133 ¼ inch panel in its current location, flanking either side of the waiting area adjacent to the entrance of the office complex. Infinity Field—Köln Series, Two Letters from Jerusalem I and II, 1983-84, are towering achievements that, though rarely seen, serve as epic examplars of Stamos’ sophisticated handling of light, pigment, language and color (fig. 5).

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FIG 4 Theodoros Stamos, Long Island studio, August 1966.

Courtesy of the Theodoros Stamos Estate

If the Jerusalem Series, despite its inspiration, presents a more secular set of associations, another series that evolved from Stamos’ trip to Jerusalem is possessed of more emphatically religious associations. Barbara Cavaliere and others have written that while in Jerusalem, Stamos began thinking about the Shroud of Turin. 16 Whether there is a direct causal connection to his experience in the Holy Land, or

FIG 5 Theodoros Stamos wall commission in Germany.

Courtesy of the Theodoros Stamos Estate

whether Stamos, like countless others in 1983, had been reading John H. Heller’s best-selling Report on the Shroud of Turin, is difficult to say. Regardless of the series’ genesis, Stamos developed another subset of Infinity Fields inspired by the cloth believed by many faithful followers to be the burial shroud of Jesus Christ. These Torino Series paintings, including the two in this exhibition, Infinity Field—Torino Series #7, 1986, (pl. 30) and Infinity Field—Torino Series, 1989, (pl. 31) are among the few paintings Stamos produced in the course of his career to overtly suggest the presence of a human (or otherworldly) character. At the same time, they are also among the least suggestive and most literal paintings the artist produced.

Infinity Field—Torino Series #7, 1986, is particularly raw and scorching. Skeletal eyes with deep sockets set above a rictus suggest a corpse-like figure. But unlike the X-ray image transferred onto the Shroud of Turin, which is remarkably pacific in countenance, Stamos’ mummified figure seems frozen in terror.

Whether or not the Shroud of Turin was a hoax or miracle may have been of little concern to Stamos. What the object represented for others on a spiritual level may also have had less to do with Stamos’ fascination with the shroud than with his own abiding interest in human consciousness and subjectivity on a metaphysical level. From his early biomorphic watercolors in the 1940s, which channeled surrealist and mythic images derived from archetypal symbols, in a search for a universal language, to his increasingly abstract references to the human figure sprinkled throughout his art in the ensuing decades, Stamos seemed always to have been striving to represent, no matter how abstract the form, what one might call Spirit, that intangible essence that transcends material and immaterial states, including life and death. What better metaphor for this exploration than the mythic Shroud of Turin, a concrete object that purports to capture the image of a spirit as it travels from life, to death, on a journey towards rebirth?

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Notes 1. Lee Hall, Betty Parsons, Artist, Dealer, Collector, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991, p. 77 and 99.

2. Kenneth B. Sawyer, introduction to “A Selection of Twelve Years,” Washington, DC: The Corcoran Gallery of Art, December 31, 1958– March 1, 1959, unpaginated.

3. Most notably by Clement Greenberg in The Nation in 1948 when he suggested that Stamos “borrowed” his style from William Baziotes, a position he retracted years later, exclaiming, “That was a mistake, wow!” In a 1991 interview, Greenberg reiterated this sentiment when asked “if you’ve ever made any big mistakes as far as your take on art?” He replied, “Yes indeed! One of the first ones was underrating Stamos . . . in the mid-forties. I recognized that mistake when I saw the paintings again in a show four or five years ago at the Whitney called The Formative Years, about American art in the forties. He had some of the best pictures there. That was a mistake, wow! And I wrote about Stamos’s show at the time and scorched him. Now I’m eating my words.” (Clement Greenberg, “Edmonton Interview” The Edmonton Contemporary Artists’ Society Newsletter, vol.3, 2 and vol. 4, 1, n.p.) Greenberg had acknowledged this years prior in a letter to Stamos dated, October 5, 1978, in which he wrote, “Dear Ted, Your paintings in that Formative Years of Abst[ract] Exp[pressionism] show (I saw it in Ithaca) were among the very best things in it, and I mean the very best. They told me how wrong I’d been that time I put them down in a Nation review; not only to say they’d owed so much to Baziotes but not to recognize how good they were. I’ve been very wrong on other occasions, but right now I feel I was never so wrong as on that one.” See also David Anfam, Abstract Expressionism, London: Thames & Hudson, 1990, p. 14, in which he writes, “Bradley Walker Tomlin, Theodoros Stamos, Richard Pousette-Dart and James Brooks, fall, I believe, into a second rank—latter-day Marcoussis and Metzingers, piquant yet peripheral.”

4. Barnett B. Newman, Theodoros Stamos, Betty Parsons Gallery, 1947.

5. cf. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art, The Museum of Modern Art, 1936. In his essay accompanying The Ideographic Picture, an exhibition for which he served as curator and included his own as well as works by Stamos, Rothko, Still, Boris Margo, Ad Reinhardt, and Hans Hofmann among others, Barnett Newman—an early champion of Stamos_noted “a new force in American painting that is the counterpart of the primitive art impulse.” (Barnett B. Newman, The Ideographic Picture, Betty Parsons Gallery, 1947. Strangely, in his subsequent essay for the exhibition following this at Parsons—Stamos’ first one person show—Newman contradicted his previous characterization by claiming, “Stamos is on the same fundamental ground as the primitive artist who never portrayed the phenomenon as an object of romance and sentiment, but always as an expression of the original noumenistic [numenistic: The belief in the existence of individual spirits that inhabit natural objects and phenomena] mystery in which the rock and man are equal. (Barnett B. Newman, Theodoros Stamos, Betty Parsons Gallery, 1947.) Retrospectively, Laurence Alloway writing in Artforum magazine in 1965 declared, “biomorphic art emerged in New York as the result of a cluster of ideas about nature, automatism, mythology, and the unconscious.” (Lawrence Alloway, “The Biomorphic Forties, Artforum, September 1965, p. 18–24.)

6. Theodoros Stamos, “Why Nature in Art?,” lecture given at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Benington College, and Hunter College in 1953, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Memphis Academy of Arts, and the Phillips Gallery, Washington, D.C., in 1954.

7. Theodoros Stamos, Statement, The New American Painting, The Museum of Modern Art, 1958.

8. Theodore Stamos, statement in It Is, Winter–Spring, 1959.

9. Theodoros Stamos, Statement, Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1965.

10. Ralph Pomeroy, Stamos, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1975, p. 53.

11. Irving Sandler, ˝ Interview of Theodoros Stamos by Iriving Sandler,“ in Anna Kafetsi ed., Theodoros Stamos 1922–1997: A Retrospective, Athens, Greece: National Gallery and Alexandros Soutzos Museum, 1997, p. 426. This was the first published transcript of a series of three interviews Sandler conducted with Stamos in 1968 at the request of the Archives of American Art. 12. Statement published in the catalogue for, Red, Blue, Orange, Green: The Structure of Color, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1971.

13. Kenneth B. Sawyer, Stamos (Paris: Editions George Fall, 1960), 23. On the other hand, Barbara Cavaliere, the esteemed scholar of Abstract Expressionism and the writer who perhaps knew Stamos and his work most closely once cautioned, “The Infinity Fields [as in Lefkada Series] are no more indigenously Greek than they are American in nationality. They penetrate way beyond such particulars and attain a universal character whose nature speaks to the viewer of any nationality living in the present.” Barbara Cavaliere, “Theodoros Stamos: On the Horizon of Mind and Coast,” Works from 1945–1984, Zurich: Knoedler Zurich, p. 33.

14. Theodore F. Wolff, “The Recent Works,” Works from 1945-1984, Zurich: Knoedler Zurich, p. 186.

15. Sam Hunter, “Theodoros Stamos, History and Recent Paintings,” New York: Kouros Gallery, April 1988, p. 25.

16. According to scholar Orsalia Partheni, after traveling to Jerusalem in 1983, Stamos began “to think of Turin, Italy where Christ’s shroud was allegedly found. These specific journeys, and the paintings produced thereafter, Infinity Field, Jerusalem series and Infinity Field, Torino series, establish an even greater specificity of symbolism in his work. There are allusions to fire and blood and the use of graphic elements that recall ancient scripts.” Orsalia Partheni, “Chronology,” in Anna Kafetsi ed., Theodoros Stamos 1922–1997: A Retrospective, Athens, Greece: National Gallery and Alexandros Soutzos Museum, 1997, p. 480.

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Theodoros Stamos. Courtesy of the Theodoros Stamos Estate

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Plates

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1 Farewell, 1946 Watercolor and ink on paper 19 x 25 ½ inches Signed, dated, and titled lower left: “Theodoros Stamos ‘46 ‘Farewell’”

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2 Untitled #64, circa 1947 Watercolor on paper 12 ⅜ x 9 7⁄16 inches Signed lower left: “Stamos” Inscribed, signed, numbered, and dated verso: “10153 / 3237 / STAMOS / #64 24x31.4 / CA. 1947”

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3 Migration, 1948 Oil on Masonite 36 x 48 inches Signed and dated lower left: “T. STAMOS. ‘48” Marked verso: ‘H 21’

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4 Untitled (Study for Three Kings, 1949), 1948 Watercolor and ink on paper 15 ⅜ x 22 ½ inches Signed and dated lower left: “Stamos 1948” Inscribed verso: “3 / 100g”

24

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5 Three Kings, 1949 Oil on Masonite 29 ¾ x 38 inches Signed and dated lower left: “T. STAMOS ‘49” Titled, signed, and dated verso: “’THREE KINGS’ / STAMOS / 1949”

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6 Mistra, 1949 Oil on Masonite 30 x 24 inches Signed and dated lower left: “Stamos ‘49” Titled, inscribed, and signed verso: “MISTRA / ‘The MANGER’ [crossed-out] /

by Stamos / 45 E. 22 St N.Y.C.”

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7 In Venice, 1949 Oil on Masonite 23 ¼ x 19 ¼ inches Signed and dated lower left: “Stamos ‘49” Titled and dated verso: “’IN Venice’ / Stamos”

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8 Tracery, 1949 Oil on Masonite 21 x 24 inches Signed lower left: “Stamos” Titled, signed, dated and inscribed verso: “’Tracery’ / Stamos / ‘49 / 21”

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9 A Day, 1949 Oil on Masonite 24 x 18 ⅛ inches Signed and dated lower left: “Stamos ‘49” Titled, signed, and dated verso: “’A DAY’ / Stamos / 1949”

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10 Untitled, circa 1948-50 Oil on canvas 34 ⅝ x 16 ¼ inches Signed lower left: “Stamos”

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11 Untitled, circa 1950-52 Oil on canvasboard 19 ⅞ x 29 ⅞ inches Signed lower left: “Stamos”

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12 Landscape, circa 1950 Oil on Masonite 8 x 24 ½ inches Signed lower left: “Stamos”

40

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13 Untitled, circa 1947-49 Oil and sand on panel 15 ¼ x 32 inches Signed lower center: “Stamos”

42

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14 Homage to Pierre Bonnard, 1965 Oil on canvas 72 x 40 inches Signed lower left: “Stamos” Titled, dated, signed, and inscribed on stretcher verso: “HOMAGE TO / PIERRE BONNARD / 1965 / STAMOS / 72x40” Inscribed on stretcher verso: “HAUT / TOP / HAUT”

44

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15 Classic Boundaries #3, 1964 Oil on canvas 36 x 48 inches Signed lower left: “Stamos” Titled on canvas overlap verso: “’CLASSIC BOUNDRIES [sic]’ #3”

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16 Hovering Yellow Sun-Box, 1967 Acrylic on canvas 56 x 52 inches Titled, dated, signed, and numbered on canvas overlap verso: “’HOVERING YELLOW SUN BOX’ 1967 / STAMOS / 3” Inscribed on stretcher verso: “Top / 52 / x / 56”

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17 Olympia Sun-Box, 1967 Oil on canvas 60 x 48 inches Titled, dated, inscribed, and signed on stretcher verso: “OLYMPIA SUN-BOX / 1967 / 62 ⅜ / STAMOS”

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18 Corinthian Sun-Box I, 1969 Acrylic on canvas 70 x 48 inches Tilted, dated, inscribed, and signed on stretcher verso: “’CORINTHIAN SUN-BOX’ I 1969 / 48x70 Stamos”

52

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19 Infinity Field-Olympia II, 1969 Gouache on paper 20 ½ x 22 ¼ inches Signed, titled, and dated verso: “Stamos, Infinity Field-Olympia II, 1969”

54

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20 Untitled - Infinity Field, circa 1971 Acrylic on paper 30 x 22 inches Signed verso: “Stamos”

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21 Infinity Field - Marathon, 1971 Acrylic on canvas 79 ⅞ x 40 ⅛ inches Signed, dated, and titled verso: “Stamos / Infinity Field Marathon / 1971”

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22 Infinity Field, Lefkada Series, 1974 Acrylic on canvas 81 x 66 inches Tilted, dated, and signed on stretcher verso: “’INFINITY FIELD, LEFKADA SERIES’ 1974 Stamos”

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23 Infinity Field, Lefkada Series, 1976 Acrylic and oil on canvas 59 ¾ x 49 ⅞ inches Titled, and inscribed on canvas overlap verso: “’INFINITY FIELD LEFKADA SERIES’ / 60x50” Numbered and dated on stretcher verso: “16 / 1976”

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24 Infinity Field, Lefkada Series #11, 1978 Watercolor and gouache on paper 22 x 30 inches Signed, titled, and dated verso: “Stamos, Infinity Field, Lefkada Series, 1978�

64

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25 Infinity Field-Lefkada Series, 1981 Acrylic on paper 22 ½ x 30 ⅛ inches Titled, dated, and signed verso: “’Infinity Field, Lefkada Series’ / 1981 / Stamos”

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26 Infinity Field, Lefkada Series, 1981 Acrylic on paper 30 ⅛ x 22 ¼ inches Titled, dated, and signed verso: “’INFINITY, LEFKADA SERIES’ / 1983 / STAMOS”

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27 Infinity Field, Lefkada Series, For Caspar David Friedrich, 1980-1 Acrylic on canvas 52 x 50 inches Titled, dated, and signed on canvas overlap verso: “’Infinity Field, Lefkada Series’ For C. D. Friedrich / 1980-1 / Stamos”

70

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28 Infinity Field - Jerusalem Series XI (1915 KI), 1984 Acrylic on paper 30 Âź x 22 inches

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29 Infinity Field, Jerusalem Series VI, 1984-5 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 60 inches Titled, signed, and dated on canvas overlap verso: “’Infinity Field, Jerusalem Series #VI’ / Stamos / 1984-5”

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30 Infinity Field-Torino Series #7, 1986 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 48 inches Signed, titled and dated verso: “Stamos, INFINITY FIELD-TORINO SERIES #7, 1986”

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31 Infinity Field Torino Series, 1989 Acrylic on canvas 66 x 50 inches Titled, dated, and signed on canvas overlap verso: “’Infinity Field Torino Series’ 1989 Stamos”

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This catalogue has been published on the occasion of the exhibition “Theodoros Stamos: Contemplations on the Universal,” organized by Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York, and presented from January 26 to March 4, 2017.

ISBN: 978-0-9985000-0-3 Front cover: Homage to Pierre Bonnard, detail, 1965 (pl. 14) Inside front cover: A Day, detail, 1949 (pl. 9) Inside back cover: Infinity Field, Lefkada Series, detail, 1974 (pl. 22) Back cover: In Venice, datail, 1949 (pl. 7) Publication copyright © 2017 Hollis Taggart Galleries All rights reserved Hollis Taggart Galleries 521 West 26th Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10001 Tel 212 628 4000 Fax 212 570 5786 www.hollistaggart.com Reproduction of contents prohibited Catalogue production: Ashley Park Design: Russell Hassell, New York Printing: Meridian Printing, Rhode Island Photograph and Reproduction Credits: Joshua Nefsky and Lothar Schnepf

HOLLI S TAGGART GALLER I ES Chelsea 521 W 26th Street 7th Floor NY, NY 10001

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Private Viewing 18 E 64th Street 3F NY, NY 10065

212 628 4000 hollistaggart.com

12/27/16 5:32 PM

THEODOROS STAMOS: CONTEMPLATIONS ON THE UNIVERSAL

HOLLI S TAG GART GALLER I ES

Theodoros Stamos: Contemplations on the Universal