Al Held 1928-2005
By Isabella Bragoli
Installing The Yellow X , “Signale,” Kunsthalle, Basel, The Al Held Foundation, http://alheldfoundation.org/about/photo-bio/
Al Held (1928 – 2005), was an American painter emerging from the post-war era and is considered to be a pioneer of hard-edged abstraction, focussing on geometric forms existing in a non-Euclidean space. During his 50-year career (in which the artist’s exploration of his painterly language and practice continually expanded), Held created works of great complexity, aiming for his abstraction to exceed the realm of the viewer’s primary senses. “The best abstract painting transforms its formal qualities into metaphors for truths unavailable to direct perception,” the artist once explained.
Held was born to Polish immigrants in Brooklyn, NY on October 12, 1928, spending two years serving in the US Navy before enrolling in the Art Students League of New York. On a GI scholarship, Held travelled to Paris to attend the Académie de la Grand Chaumière (1951-53) attending the classes of Ossip Zadkine and fostering friendships with Ellsworth Kelly and Joan Mitchell. Returning to New York in 1953, where Abstract Expressionism was dominant, Held’s work, by contrast, began to move away from the formal tenets of the movement, ultimately questioning its reliance of reductive flatness and preferring, instead, to focus his work around physical space and gravity. In this light, Held’s Abstract Expressionist compositions of thick, gestural marks gave way to the saturated colours and geometric forms found particularly in his Alphabet paintings.
The Alphabet works are fundamental in exhibiting Held’s flattened, two-dimensional contours either pruned by the constraints of the canvas or barely contained within. The work’s monumentalism invades the sense of ‘real’ space, engulfing the viewer and altering the perception of the spectator’s surroundings. The irregular, thick build-up of acrylic paint below the visible surface is a result of Held’s continuous re-thinking of structure and formal relationships, contributing to the work’s dimensionality and affirming, as Storr notes, the painting as an ‘almost sculptural presence.’ ‘The Yellow X’ is appreciated as one of Held’s seminal “Letter Paintings,” invoking the artist’s anticipation of his own future. Made on two conjoined canvases, its surface is almost entirely covered by the bright yellow, acrylic paint that Storr describes as ‘Naugahyde thick.’ The invention of warped perspective and new pictorial space within this piece contends with the legacies of both European and American abstraction and resonates with important three-dimensional works from the mid-1960s, notably Robert Morris’s large format geometric installations.
Held’s paintings demonstrate a thorough and thoughtful experimentation characterised by the intellectual rigour with which he approached his work: “I don’t just want to express myself; I want to say something.” Ultimately, the artist questions the nature of space, form, and perception not only in painting but in the phenomenological understanding of our own existence.
All artist quotes taken from http://alheldfoundation.org/about/in-his-own-words/
Bibliography
McCoubrey, John W. "Al Held--Recent Paintings." Art Journal 28, no. 3 (1969): 322-24. Accessed October 16, 2020. doi:10.2307/775261.
Sandler, Irving. "Al Held (1928–2005): A Maverick in the New York Art World." American Art 20, no. 1 (2006): 108-11. Accessed October 16, 2020. doi:10.1086/504065.
Storr, Robert. “‘The Big “A”: Robert Storr on Al Held” in Artforum International, Vol.44, No.2, October 2005