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Al Held grew up in
Bedford-Stuyvesant and the East Bronx. His father was a jeweler who
worked in a factory. Thrown out of school at age 16 for chronic
truancy, he hung out at the movies. He says, "I was very, very
malcontent. I just wanted to get out of my skin, and the movies were
a perfect escape. I'm an expert on '40s movies."
Held joined the Navy to "get away from home-fast." After a
two-year hitch, he returned to New York. Among the people he met at
a young Socialist gathering place was a man who was studying at the
Art Students League. Held was interested, and, after auditing a
class there, Held became sufficiently intrigued to secretly attend a
few classes in drawing and painting. To everyone's surprise, he used
the GI Bill to enroll as a full-time student.
Again he says, "I had never been to a museum--my family was not
cultured in that sense."
After launching his career as an Abstract Expressionist, Held became
dissatisfied with this type of painting and began exhibiting
canvases filled with crisp-edged, raucously colored geometric
shapes. Dubbed "concrete abstractions," these works
established Held as a critical success. Nancy Grimes writes in ARTnews
(February 1988):
By virtue of its public scale and its clarity of form, color, and
structure, Held's painting from this period projected an exuberant,
humanistic confidence - a refreshing alternative to Abstract
Expressionism's tormented vision of an imperiled self."
1984: Many artists would not have done what Held did at this
point--risk losing critical and financial support by turning a
successful style inside out--but he thought his painting, and for
that matter all avant-garde painting, had reached an impasse. The
concrete abstractions had become so simple, their formal vocabulary
so reduced, that further growth had become problematic."
His body of work:
- In the late 1960s, Held jeopardized his career by the decision to
break up the picture plane with suggestions of volume and
depth-challenging the prevailing "formalist dictum that a
primary task of painting was to reveal its essential quality of
flatness. . . . he began the black and white spatial conundrums that
constituted his next body of work." (Grimes)
- During this period, from 1967-78, Held was accused of going into
figurative art.
- By the late 1970s he initiated another major change in his work by
reintroducing color as a way of articulating forms. This alienated
many viewers who had begun to understand his black-and-white
paintings and considered them to be his finest.
Held's work continues to evolve as he moves forward without regard
for trends. He says,
". . . the best abstract painting transforms its formal
qualities into metaphors for truths unavailable to direct
perception. In the world we live in, nonobjective art is the
unique vehicle to try and discuss things like: How do things come
together? How do multiple and contradictory truths exist in the
same place at the same time? The formal qualities are important to
me only in the sense that they're metaphors for the way I see the
world." (Grimes)
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Sources:
• Brown,
Kathan. "Al Held." Crown Point Press Newsletter
(June 1994).
• Grimes, Nancy. "Al Held, Reinventing Abstraction." ARTnews
87 (February 1988).
• Held, Al. "When Is A Painting Finished?" ARTnews
84 (November 1985).
• Miro, Marsha. "Paintings Born of Geometry and Light." Detroit
Free Press, 15 May 1983.
• Nash, Steven. Al Held ,exhibition brochure. Dallas, TX:
Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.
• Westfall, Steven. "Al Held." Art in America 73
(June 1985).
Who's Who in American Art 16th ed.
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