Theodoros Stamos (1922-1997) was one of the important American Abstract Expressionist painters and among the earliest voices within the broader movement toward Color Field painting. He is notable for his early use of color to explore the possibilities of abstraction and form, and as the youngest member of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, he was also the youngest of the celebrated "Irascibles," the vanguard group of American artists memorialized in Nina Leen's famous 1950 photograph. Stamos developed an expressive process that Clement Greenberg would later place within what he called Post-Painterly Abstraction, and Stamos became a significant contributor to the Color Field movement. He once described his ambition in his own words:

"My feeling was to create more infinity with color."

Born in 1922 to Greek immigrant parents on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Stamos began his formal study of art in 1936 on scholarship at the American Artists School. Under the guidance of his teacher Joseph Solman and the pioneering gallerist Betty Parsons, who gave him his first solo exhibition at the Wakefield Gallery in 1943, Stamos pursued his early interest in painting and began reading Surrealist literature. Deeply influenced by automatism and by the work of William Baziotes, he began to employ indeterminate psychosomatic forms as the subjects of his paintings, producing early canvases marked by biomorphic imagery and a distinctive sense of interior life.

As an Abstract Expressionist, Stamos joined the ranks of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, and he became the youngest member of the Irascible Eighteen during the late 1940s. His work is now widely credited as a precursor to the Color Field movement that would come to define much of American painting during the following decades. His mature paintings, particularly his celebrated Infinity Field series of the later years, translate his lifelong engagement with color and light into compositions of quiet contemplative power.

Stamos went on to teach at prominent institutions including the Art Students League of New York, the Cummington School of Fine Arts, and Black Mountain College, mentoring the next generation of American painters. He continues to be exhibited by more than fifty major museums and institutions worldwide, and he died in his father's hometown of Lefkada, Greece, in 1997.