Born in Idabel, Oklahoma, in 1929, Harold Moncreau Stevenson Jr. began painting at a very young age, at the age of just four, and immediately expressed his desire to make art his career.
Best known for his paintings of male nudes, Stevenson was a key figure in the post-war artistic avant-garde.
After attending the University of Oklahoma, Stevenson moved to New York in 1949, where he began to mingle with artists and the circles of contemporary art.
During those years, Stevenson met Andy Warhol, who had also recently arrived in the Big Apple, with whom he formed a long and deep friendship. In fact, it was Stevenson who helped Warhol with his first solo exhibition at the Hugo Gallery in New York in 1952, then directed by Alexander Iolas, and it was on that occasion that the now legendary gallerist began to familiarize with Stevenson's works.
In the late fifties, Stevenson moved to Paris, where he worked with gallerist Iris Clert, and frequently traveled to Athens, London and Venice.
The sixties were the years of artistic maturity and major exhibitions, including participation in the New Realists exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, where Stevenson exhibited for the first time the work The Eye Of Lightning Billy, later acquired by the MoMA in 2008, and the exhibition Harold Stevenson at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris, which included the monumental work The New Adam: a painting over twelve meters long depicting the full nudity of the actor and muse Sal Mineo, acquired by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2005.
In 1963, a photograph immortalized the artist alongside Iris Clert and Yves Saint Laurent under the Eiffel Tower, where Stevenson hung a huge painting depicting a Spanish bullfighter. A few days later, the municipality ordered the dismantling of the work due to the intense traffic caused in the city center by curious motorists.
Despite the success of those years, Stevenson had to cope with the deaths of Iris Clert and Alexander Iolas, both of which occurred in the late eighties, and with a society not yet fully ready to embrace his works, laden with eroticism and gay adoration.
Stevenson died at the age of eighty-nine in his hometown, never having stopped painting.
Works by Harold Stevenson are included in important permanent collections of American museums: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut; Blanton Gallery at the University of Texas, Austin.
