At Independent 20th century, Andrew Kreps Gallery presents works by Harold Stevenson (b. 1929, Idabel, Oklahoma, d. 2018, Idabel, Oklahoma), primarily from the 1960s, a pivotal moment in the artist's career. Moving between Paris, New York, and his home state of Oklahoma, Stevenson began creating tightly cropped, often sensual compositions that depicted enlarged fragments of the male body. After seeing Alain Delon's stage debut in a Paris play in 1961, Stevenson returned to the theater night after night with a sketchbook, capturing Delon's features in a series of rarely exhibited drawings. The presentation also includes a monumental work from the series Love is an Offering, Lengths of a Chain, first shown in Stevenson's 1965 exhibition, The Idabel Paintings, at Alexander Iolas Gallery. Writing to Iolas in 1966, Stevenson re-affirmed the importance of these works, stating he felt that "the glorification of the human body will soon become the preoccupation of all American artists. Space travel, [the] continuation of wars blossoming all over the globe, and the total inadequacy of the machine to give any emotional consolation to the human being, will oblige artists to begin an investigation into the significance of the human being, naked, beautiful, bigger than any of his ideas."
Over the course of seven decades, Harold Stevenson created a singular body of work focused on the depiction of the human form. He remained radically unabashed about the sensual content of his work, even in the face of censorship, like in 1964, when Italian police confiscated his paintings from an exhibition in Venice, nearly landing his then-dealer, Iris Clert in prison. Stevenson’s career would be marked equally by these misfires, including curator Lawrence Alloway’s rejection of his monumental work, The New Adam, from the Guggenheim exhibition, Six Painters and the Object, as it was by the kaleidoscopic connections he forged in New York and Europe. First moving to New York in 1949 to study at the Art Student’s League under Yasuo Kuniyoshi, he met Andy Warhol that same year, and would later be the subject of Warhol’s first film. Iolas became a steadfast support of his work in the fifties, enabling Stevenson to move to Paris. While in Europe, Stevenson befriended Peggy Guggenheim and entered into a relationship with Lord Timothy Willoughby, who would model for his paintings until his disappearance at sea in 1963. While both Stevenson’s life and work lent themselves to a certain sensationalism, they were anchored in an exploration of the fullness of human experience, including desire. Stevenson sought to create tension and narrative outside of the works’ frames, suggesting the enduring power of the human form as a tool for communication.
