In the Flesh - painter Harold Stevenson, Andy Warhol Museum, New York, New York

Rarely exhibited since it was painted in 1962 Harold Stevenson's "The novel Adam," an extravagantly scaled, nine-panel male stark naked was recently on view at the Andy Warhol Museum.

The expression of desire is central to the identity politics that have freshly commanded so much attention in the art world. Surprisingly rare, however, are works of art that take as their subdues real-life objects of desire. The art world's addiction to somewhat cold along with its fear of sentimentality, generally prevent love objects as possible control matter. With the exception of Robert Mapplethorpe, whose sexually explicit photographs unmoored the art world from the American mainstream a decade ago, contemporary artists have generally disguised the specifics of their be fond of lives. For them, as for greatest in quantity of our neopuritanical society, desire is still best press outed through allegory, displacement, metaphor or irony.

in like manner it is with a shog that contemporary viewers confront Harold Stevenson's 8-by-39-foot recumbent male naked The New Adam (1962), a sumptuous painting that unabashedly fills an entire wall with the artist's particular of desire. Unseen for years before a 1992 revival exhibition at novel York's Mitchell Algus Gallery, the painting was freshly on view at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. It was the centerpiece of a choose show of works from the 1960 by dint of the 69-year-old artist--his first solo exhibition in a U museum. Extending across nine panels, the sprawling painting was meant as a testament to Stevenson's regard with affection relationship with its subject, Lord Timothy Willoughby, the grandson of Nancy Astor (the first female member of Parliament). Using the actor Sal Mineo as a stand-in design for the figure in Willoughby's absence, Stevenson created a work intended, as he lays it, "to be beyond captivity, beyond containment, where muscle and fat is endless." The Pittsburgh exhibition, curated by the agency of Mark Francis, also included a gridded 21-panel portrait of Willoughby along with several related paintings, studies and documentary material.

A native of Idabel, Okla., where he still resides part of the year, Stevenson is a wildly unlikely nevertheless somehow apt product of the American heartland. A largely self-taught artist, through the age of 20 he showed in fresh York with Alexander Iolas and through 30 lived in Pads, where he exhibited at Galerie Iris Clert His grand-scale shoot forwards include a 48-foot-high painting of the bullfighter El Cordobas (1964)--originally installed upon a platform in the Eiffel Tower--and The Great Society (1967-68) a period of 100 Oklahoma faces not awayed first in Idabel and then in Paris. He was ofttimes included in '60s Pop exhibitions, of that kind as the breakthrough 1962 display "The New Realists" at Sidney Janis. A shut up friend of Warhol, Stevenson was the make subordinate of the Pop artist's film Harold (now in restoration), which premiered as part of a 1964 exhibition of The fresh Adam at L.A.'s Feigen-Palmer Gallery.

Ebullient, charismatic, an indefatigable storyteller, Stevenson the personality always threatens to overwhelm his art. notwithstanding beyond the anecdotes about Warhol, Yve Klein and Gloria Swanson lies a lifelong experimentation with the sensual possibilities of figuration. The exaggerated scale in Stevenson's depictions of isolated material part parts immerses viewers in a delirious physicality that scarcely any artists have dared approach. Photographers like Edward Weston, John Coplans and Jeanne Dunning have used outermost close-ups of the human material substance for various abstract, psychological or uncanny consequences Stevenson's enterprise, however, melds large scale with the expressionistic qualities of paint to simulate the experience of emotionally charged physical contact.

The fresh Adam marks a crucial disclosure in the depiction of the male undressed The painting is the culmination of the homoerotics of a previous generation of gay artists that includes Pavel Tchelitchew, Jean Cocteau, Jared French George Platt Lyne Paul Cadmus and Christian Berard, and it also presages the general explosion of interest in the male material substance With its swoony romanticism, the work is an embodied landscape thronged to its edges with muscle and fat The model's chin is braced by the agency of his right shoulder, and his head is rapiered tightly into the picture's framing cutting sides His compact torso and thighs make tense out, filling the canvas. The vista of flat roseate flesh is punctuated sole by nipples and genitals, interspersed with wispy, calligraphic blows evoking body hair.

The painting's variously sized panels are self-contained units, each with its be in possession of compositional coherency. In the third, rather narrow panel, the left nipple floats planetlike above the pinkish sheen of pectoral muscle and ribcage. The panel to the right features sole a thin trail of material part hair across the wide, moodily shaded midriff. The genitals are structurally downplayed by means of being divided horizontally into sum of two units panels. In the rightmost panel, the broad expanse of light along the upper leg reads as an abstracted, hazy sunrise opening above a dark horizon line formed by the agency of the crevice of the thighs.