Theodoros Stamos

Theodoros Stamos
b. 1922, New York, New York
d. 1997, Greece

Theodoros Stamos was an American Abstract Expressionist painter, and one of the youngest artists in the New York Abstract Expressionist group—nearly two decades younger than his close friend Mark Rothko. Born in New York to a family of Greek immigrants, Stamos first began drawing at the age of eight while he was recovering from a ruptured spleen. In 1943, at the precocious age of twenty, Stamos was given his first solo exhibition at the Wakefield Gallery in New York. A couple years later, he exhibited in the Whitney Biennial, and the following year, when he was only twenty-three, the Museum of Modern Art acquired one of his works.

His works were exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art's touring exhibition The New American Painting, which introduced Abstract Expressionism to European eyes, and in 1950, at the age of twenty-seven, Stamos received his first solo museum exhibition at the Phillips Gallery in Washington, D.C. Today, his works are housed many collections of American art, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Seattle Art Museum.