Untitled (Bird)

An early adherent to Abstract Expressionism, Stamos began his career in the 1940s working alongside fellow New York School painters such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. These two drawings are representative of Stamos's early work featuring a symbolic vocabulary developed from a variety of sources. The constellation of forms that make up the creature depicted in "The Beast's Flight" for instance, is equally suggestive of archaic hieroglyphs and twentieth-century Surrealist painting. Likewise, the delicate brushwork and interest in the natural world exhibited in "Untitled (Bird)," an ink drawing that was completed shortly after the artist returned from a European sojourn that brought him into personal contact with Brancusi, Giacometti and Picasso, illustrates Stamos's interest in synthesizing elements of Oriental calligraphy with the style of the modern masters.