Exhibition - Harold Stevenson: Less Real Than My Routine Fantasy

The gallery is happy to share that this summer, Art Omi will present the first institutional solo exhibition of Harold Stevenson in New York, exploring Stevenson’s unflinching commitment to the sensual for more than five decades, and insistence on placing his paintings in the public sphere in a pre-Stonewall era.

In 1966, Artforum described Stevenson as an “elegant young cowboy from Oklahoma” who became a darling among the most powerful figures in art, fashion, and culture in Paris, Athens, and Tehran. Rendering armpits, belly buttons, and mouths as total environments and expanded erogenous zones, Stevenson’s work across painting, sculpture, and writing is singular and long overdue for critical reappraisal. 

Stevenson’s unflinching commitment to the male nude led to trouble: a jail sentence for his gallerist, Iris Clert, in 1962; his work’s removal from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1963; and, in response to an Artforum feature on his work in 1966, a published letter of complaint excoriating the magazine for promoting such “contemporary trash and moral depravity” in its pages.

Stevenson’s career was filled with near breaks. He was invited to participate in the 1963 exhibition Six Painters and the Object at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, but when curator Lawrence Alloway saw a photograph of his painting The New Adam, he cut the work and replaced Stevenson with Robert Rauschenberg. Stevenson had painted the thirty-nine-by-eight-foot nude in modeling sessions with actor Sal Mineo, his lover (though he also described it as an homage to another lover, Lord Timothy Willoughby, who mysteriously disappeared at sea); Alloway informed him the Guggenheim could not exhibit “a nude with a phallus the size of a man.” Stevenson, in turn, used Alloway’s rejection letter in press materials while touring the painting across Europe. That same year, the artist installed a forty-foot painting of another lover, matador El Cordobés, atop the Eiffel Tower; it caused such traffic bottlenecks that he was forced to take it down after less than a week.