Harold Stevenson 5 Minute Video

It will take at least an hour to tell Harold Stevenson’s story. Here’s a 5-minute video from Art in Community: The Harold Stevenson Collection, curated by Dian Jordan, University of Texas Permian Basin.

Transcript:

Harold Stevenson was uninvited by the Guggenheim New York for their 1963 Six Painters and the Object.

After being rejected, Stevenson’s contributions to Pop were largely forgotten.

This exhibit re-discovers America’s Lost Pop Artist, Harold Stevenson.

LIFE magazine dubbed him The Next Michelangelo.

The Los Angeles Times wrote, “Stevenson’s very personal contribution to pop art consists of greatly magnifying the human anatomy.”

Richard Feigen and Herbert Palmer exhibited Stevenson in Los Angeles. Andy Warhol made a movie for the opening.

Stevenson was known for his giganticism.

Pop.

Large scale works.

Anatomy, male nudes.

Surrealism, nouveaux realists, neo-romantic.

Expressionism.

Contemporary.

The labels are partly correct.

Stevenson was never one to be contained by labels.

“I knew I had to be me from the time I was four-years-old. I wouldn’t be able to breathe if I tried to be something I’m not. Painting was breathing.

Harold was a child of the depression. “I went around town with my paints. I’d ask for a small amount of money.”

Stevenson was popular, elected Student Council President his junior year, an honor reserved for a senior.

Harold was older when I met him. He had been painting for eighty years. He showed me a landscape from a Beavers Bend art camp for students.
“I met my best friend there. She became a photographer and took pictures of my work for decades. Art camp was taught by a fashion illustrator from Paris Texas junior college.

“At first, I thought she had no head,” remarked the nephew who inherited the family portrait.

In Pioneer Family, the baby’s face is featureless.

Stevenson had a sister that died in infancy. The picture frame empty, a life unlived.

“When I was in third grade, I had this soft, blue sweater. I adored that sweater. My teacher said I could not wear it anymore to class. … Darling, I wore that sweater every day for the rest of the year.”

Stevenson carried this attitude of independence when Jim Crow permeated the south.

“My good friend, Calli, our family cook, and I had been playing tea-party with real grown up cups and saucers, and real tea.

Paintings of teapots and teacups are grouped together in the gallery.

Childhood was interrupted. War was real.

“I was sent to Hope, Arkansas to live with my grandmother. I mostly stayed in the attic and painted. I witnessed the solemn procession of a young man from Hope being carried home. I watched it from my attic window. He was dead in that flag-draped coffin proceeding slowly down the street.”

The bombs of World War II hit and destroyed my fantasies. Stevenson returned to Idabel for his sophomore year of high school.

A classmate recalled, It was a terrible time to be a teenager. We were not old enough to fight. It was not a time to be frivolous. Boys and men were dying. When the war ended in ‘45, we started the yearbook. Harold did all the artwork.”

War touched Stevenson again. When the Twin Towers fell, he was living in New York. He processed the day painting Portrait of a Grandson from a single photograph as chaos ensued in the city.

Portrait of Mya McBrayer was also painted from a single photograph.

Stevenson was a confident portrait artist. Bill Capps commissioned a portrait of his wife, but was not pleased.

Stevenson responded bluntly, “if I were to alter this image, I would make a dreadful mistake. It was no service to paint only sweet and gentle qualities. It reflects a fifty-year-old woman at the peak of her life taking on the world. She was what most women would never dream of. I would rather burn it than change a single brush stroke.”

Stevenson said of Gray Lady, “I didn’t paint the surface as much as I painted the inside of a person. I don’t even remember who she is, but her soul seems to be there.”

Harold painted Russell Haley, he owned the appliance store.

Harold painted up to three generations of a family. He painted Richie’s grandmother thirty years prior.

He painted Drives an 18-Wheeler. And cowboys. And a Bull Rider Resting on His Boots.

He painted family. “My brother did all the things my parents desired. He became a lawyer, got married, had children – so I could be me.”

Lord Tony Snowdon photographed the brothers when he visited Idabel.

Ten virgins took their lamps and went forth to meet the bridegroom. …the wise took oil with their lamps.

“Oh Harold, can’t you paint flowers like everybody else,” his mother once said.

In 2005, the Guggenheim acquired The New Adam for their permanent collection.

Re-discover Harold Stevenson, America’s lost Pop Artist at the Museum of the Red River, Idabel OK.

Art in Community: The Harold Stevenson Collection on exhibit through August 23, 2020.