Works-In-Progress Seminar

Join us in the Jackson Seminar Room at the Helmerich Center for American Research (HCAR) for our first WIP Seminar of the semester, featuring Dr. Kirsten Olds.

Paper Title: “Harold Stevenson: Realism Re-Figured”
Emerging on the national art scene in the early 1960s, Oklahoma-born Harold Stevenson’s art in form and subject stymied critics, who didn’t know quite where to place it in the movements of the time: enlarged and fragmented like Pop Art, but eschewing the lure of commercial facture or subjects of commodity culture; dream-like not unlike Surrealism, but with paint handling conjuring both Realism and a new Romanticism. And the subject matter in particular disquieted critics, who were confronted by unapologetically sensual male nudes—sometimes full figures, other times bodies fragmented by the hands of the artist. Focusing on Stevenson’s paintings from the early 1960s, this paper asks what it means to figure and re-figure the male body. How might the artist’s explorations recalibrate our relationship to subject and object, to the “real” and the realized?