Harold Stevenson: Less Real Than My Routine Fantasy

This summer, Art Omi is pleased to present Harold Stevenson: Less Real Than My Routine Fantasy, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in New York, on view from June 28 to October 26, 2025. The exhibition will trace forty years of Stevenson’s exploration of the body as an expanded field across painting, drawing, 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. 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. 

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 this year. 

The exhibition is curated by Sara O’Keeffe, Senior Curator, with Guy Weltchek, Curatorial Assistant.