Curatorial Tour | Harold Stevenson: Less Real Than My Routine Fantasy

Curatorial Tour | Harold Stevenson: Less Real Than My Routine Fantasy
Senior Curator Sara O’Keeffe provides a special tour of the exhibition Harold Stevenson: Less Real Than My Routine Fantasy, the first institutional solo exhibition in New York of Harold Stevenson (1929–2018). The exhibition traces forty years of Stevenson’s exploration of the human body as an environment 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.