Theodoros Stamos was an important member of the first generation of American Abstract Expressionists. Renowned for the passion and originality of his vision, he was a firm believer in the role of nature in the creation of abstract art. Throughout the course of his career, capturing "the idea of a thing" and making his emotions visible remained Stamos's primary aesthetic goal.

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Born in New York City on December 31st 1922, Stamos was the son of Stamatata and Theodoros Stamos, immigrants from Sparta, Greece, who operated a hat cleaning and shoeshine store on the Lower East Side. He began to draw at the age of eight, while recovering from a ruptured spleen. He went on to attend the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, where, having demonstrating considerable artistic talent, he was awarded a scholarship to attend evening classes at the American Artists' School. He initially studied sculpture under Simon Kennedy and Joseph Konzai, but on the advice of Joseph Solman he turned to painting. He subsequently made visits to Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, An American Place, where he met the American Modernist painters Milton Avery and Arthur Dove. Intent on pursuing an artistic career, Stamos abandoned his high school studies in 1939, three months before he was scheduled to graduate.

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In 1941, Stamos established a small frame store on East 18 th Street where the painters Arshile Gorky and Fernand Leger were among his customers. Two years later he had his first solo exhibition at the Wakefield Gallery/Bookshop, operated by Betty Parsons, who would go on to establish her own legendary gallery. Throughout the ensuing years, Stamos's connections in the art world broadened as he developed friendships with cutting-edge abstractionists such as Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and John Graham and acquired the patronage of the collector Edwards Wales Root. In 1947, he went to the West Coast, at which time he visited the painter Mark Tobey, and in the following year he traveled to Europe, where he came into contact with Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso and other well-known artists. In the ensuing years, Stamos participated in group shows such as the Whitney Biennial (1945) and the Museum of Modern Art exhibition, The New American Painting (1958-59), which was instrumental in introducing Abstract Expressionism to Europe. From the late 1940s until 1970, his work was exhibited regularly at the Betty Parsons Gallery and at the Andre Emmerich Gallery.

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Stamos's early paintings were influenced by Surrealism and by the work of Symbolist-inspired painters such as Dove and Paul Klee. During the 1940s, he frequently used biomorphic imagery as a means of conveying mythical connotations and the "inner life" of natural objects. Much of his iconography was derived from stones, starfish, shells, and pieces of wood that he found washed up on Massachusetts's beaches. This interest in natural forms and ancient myths, as well as in the birth and death cycles of nature, was also inspired by Stamos's visits to the Museum of Natural History in New York.

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With the encouragement of painters such as Gottlieb and Rothko, Stamos went on to develop a gestural, painterly style that made him one of the progenitors the Abstract Expressionist movement. By the 1950s, his earlier biomorphic shapes had evolved into loosely rendered balls and rectangles structured by slashed and scumbled brushstrokes. Throughout the next decade, Stamos favored increasingly reductive compositions, often featuring large boxes portrayed in modulated color, that filled almost the entire canvas.

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In 1948, Stamos closed his frame shop to paint full-time. Three years later he settled in East Marion, Long Island, moving into a house designed by the sculptor Tony Smith. During the 1950s, Stamos taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and at the Art Students League in New York. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1958. Stamos also had many one-man shows in New York and in Europe. He also had the distinction of being the youngest member of "The Irascibles," the group of Abstract Expressionists featured in Nina Leen's famous 1951 photograph for Life magazine.

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From 1972 to 1975, Stamos was involved in a difficult and highly publicized trial involving his role as an executor of the estate of Mark Rothko--a case which he lost. Seeking a respite from the art scene, he went on to spend part of each year on the Ionian island of Lefkada, Greece, where, renewing his contact with nature, he embarked on a series of contemplative, elegant and very atmospheric color abstractions known as the Infinity Field Series.

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Stamos died in a hospital in Yiannina, Greece, in 1997. He has since been referred to as "an authentic heir to the great Romantic tradition in which the search for correspondences between what is felt and what is seen, takes on an almost mythical cast." Examples of Stamos's work can be found in major public collections throughout the United States and abroad, including the National Pinacotek, Athens, Greece; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of Art, New York; the Museo d'Art Moderno, Rio de Janiero, Brazil; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Tel Aviv Museum; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna.