Art Omi presents Less Real Than My Routine Fantasy, the first institutional solo exhibition in New York of Harold Stevenson (1929–2018). The exhibition, on view from June 28 to October 26, 2025, traces forty years of Stevenson's exploration of the human body as an environment across paintings, drawings, and writing. In the pre-Stonewall era 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.
Stevenson often presented diary entries to accompany his paintings, in which he wrote of the rodeos and cowboys of his hometown of Idabel, Oklahoma, and his conquests—many of them erotic tales. These typewritten stories played up the cowboy image, a hit among the artist’s Parisian, Greek, and Iranian patrons. They also refer to histories with palpable legacies in his home state, including the Trail of Tears and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Stevenson kept company with many celebrated figures of his time: He went dancing with Gloria Swanson. Andy Warhol and Marisol were close friends (Stevenson and Marisol kiss in Warhol’s 1964 film Kiss). He dined with the Shah of Iran. Yves Klein was a regular visitor to his studio.
Much of Stevenson's life was marked by waiting: for critics to contend with his work, for the American art world to shed its puritanism, for overdue checks to arrive. In 1999, at age seventy, he wrote that he was shocked to find these disappointments "less real than my routine fantasy. ...I am determined to go on living that fantasy a lot longer." After all, he wrote, "Fantasy is what art is made from."
Near the end of his life, Stevenson spent more than two years waiting for the Guggenheim to decide if they would acquire The New Adam, the painting they had rejected decades earlier. Grace Glueck had trashed the work in her New York Observer review of his exhibition at Mitchell Algus Gallery in 1992. Stevenson published a scathing response, titled “SoHo Rats”: “She will not be around when I show again in 30 more years, but by then there may be a critic unprejudiced toward the message of nobility and spirit The New Adam hopes to offer.” A little past Stevenson’s thirty-year prediction, his work returns to New York with a bang.
Harold Stevenson: Less Real Than My Routine Fantasy is curated by Sara O’Keeffe, Art Omi Senior Curator, with Guy Weltchek, Art Omi Curatorial Assistant.
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