Al Held
Went from thick abstract slabs to hard-edged architectural space you could fall into.
Al Held was born in Brooklyn in 1928, dropped out of school, joined the navy, and studied on the GI Bill at the Art Students League and then in Paris. His first mature work in the late 1950s used very heavy impasto in blocky abstract shapes. From the mid-1960s he stripped the surface flat and moved to hard-edged black-and-white paintings of geometric solids — cubes, pyramids, arcs — arranged in a space with several mutually contradictory perspectives, so the eye cannot settle. Colour returned in the 1970s. He taught at Yale for two decades and died in Italy in 2005.
Scale is the defining factor: Held painted very large, and the major canvases are architectural in size and demand institutional wall space, which shapes who can buy them. The black-and-white works of 1967 to 1978 are a distinct and highly regarded group. Because the paintings depend on absolutely clean edges and flat acrylic fields, any surface damage, retouching or edge wear is unusually conspicuous. There is a body of works on paper in acrylic and watercolour, and a modest number of print editions.
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