NOW REPRESENTING THE ESTATE OF HAROLD STEVENSON

Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce representation of the estate of Harold Stevenson (b. 1929, Idabel, Oklahoma, d. 2018, Idabel, Oklahoma). This fall, the gallery will present a solo presentation of Stevenson’s work at Independent 20th Century, on view from September 24–27, 2026.

Over the course of seven decades, Harold Stevenson created a singular body of work focused on the depiction of the human form, as “naked, beautiful, and bigger than [one’s] ideas.” 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. The prominent art dealer Alexander Iolas soon became a steadfast supporter of his work, enabling him to move to Paris in the late fifties. 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. Often depicting enlarged fragments of the body in tightly cropped compositions, 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.

Stevenson’s monumental work, The New Adam, 1962, was recently included in Sixties Surreal at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, on view from September 24, 2025 through January 19, 2026. In 2025, Art Omi, Ghent, presented the first institutional excision of Stevenson’s work in New York titled, Less Real Than My Routine Fantasy, curated by Sara O’Keeffe. Earlier that year, the gallery presented Stevenson’s first solo exhibition in New York in over twenty years. Stevenson exhibited extensively throughout his life, including in the landmark 1962 exhibition New Realists at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. His work was shown in the 1963 Whitney Annual and included in both the Piccola Biennale, 1962 and the Biennale Flottante, 1964, organized by Iris Clert as collateral events of the Venice Biennale. In 1999, Stevenson’s painting The New Adam, 1962, was exhibited at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. Harold Stevenson maintained a close relationship to his hometown of Idabel, returning frequently throughout his life, often documenting its broader community in his work. In 2005, he moved back permanently, where he continued to paint until his death in 2018.

Harold Stevenson’s works are held in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Oklahoma City Museum of Art, and the Blanton Gallery at the University of Texas, Austin, among others.