Al Held
American
(New York, New York, 1928 - 2005, Todi, Italy)
Al Held was born in Brooklyn, New York on October 12, 1928 to Harry and Clara Held.(1) He was the older of two children born to immigrant Polish-Jewish parents. His father was a jeweler and his mother a housewife. His adolescent years were filled with skipping school and avoiding getting a job. On an almost daily basis he would go, by himself, to two double features a day at the 42nd Street theaters. While watching movies, “he became an acutely visual person, one who ingested information looking up at a grand silver rectangle on which larger-than-life images in black-and-white sped before his eyes.”(2) He was never interested in school, did not read books, newspapers, or magazines, nor did he ever visit an art museum. By 1944, he was expelled from school.
After being inundated with war propaganda through World War II, Held decided to join the Navy at age seventeen, in 1945. At this age, Held needed his parents’ signatures to join the Navy. He describes this as being somewhat of a scandalous act for a Jewish father; he likened it to his father giving away his only son and something not done in his family’s Jewish culture. In being sent to Virginia for training, Held made his first trip out of the state of New York.(3) During his two years of Naval service, he was stationed on a submarine in and around the Panama Canal. In 1947, Held was honorably discharged and eligible for the G.I. Bill support for education.
It was at this time Held began his association with art. He was raised in a very Socialist environment, so when a couple of kids from his parents’ neighborhood in the East Bronx asked him to go to Greenwich Village to build May Day floats, he accepted. It was while he was building May Day floats that he became acquainted with Folksay, a group involved with the Progressive presidential ticket of Henry Wallace. His involvement brought about a close friendship with another young Leftist, Nick Krushenick. Krushenick started going to the Art Students League and often spoke of the great paintings he was going to create. Krushenick’s drive and enthusiasm led Held, who had never visited a museum or seen a painting, to take an anatomy drawing class at the Art Students League. In 1948, Held enrolled in classes at the Art Students League during the day and supported himself by working in the school’s cafeteria at night. During his two years there, he studied with Kimon Nicolaides, Robert Beverly Hale, and Harry Sternberg. Toward the end of his first year, Sternberg decided Held lacked artistic talent and advised him to give up painting.
Fortunately Held ignored this advice and continued to study art. Becoming more deeply involved with Leftist politics and social realism, Held desired to study with an artist who shared his beliefs. Consequently, he left the Art Students League in 1950 to study in Mexico at the school of Mexican Muralist, David Alfarao Siquieros. However, Siquieros was arrested, sentenced to jail, and his school closed because of his radical social realist beliefs and actions. Still wanting to relocate out of New York, Held chose to go to Paris and study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiérie from 1950 through 1953. Held describes Paris as “a marvelous place in those days to paint out of New York.” He interprets this idea as wanting to learn how to draw the figure before tackling abstract painting and Jackson Pollock.(4) After studying the human figure, Held was inspired to combine the subjective of Pollock with the objective of Piet Mondrian to create a universal image, meaning that he dripped paint into confined geometric planes. In 1952, Held had his first solo gallery show with these works at Galerie Huit, a co-op gallery in Paris. However, he destroyed almost all of these canvases before leaving Paris.
He returned to New York in 1953, where he soon married Giselle Wexler and had a daughter, Mara. The marriage lasted just under two years. After his return to New York, Held’s work went through several changes; however, he continued to use abstract geometric forms as his subject matter. In the mid-1950s, he applied many thick layers of paint to his canvases in the mode of Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock and Franz Kline. His imagery consisted of geometric forms that were broken up and congealed into other abstract forms, all based in his desire “to give action painting some structure.”(5) For less than a year, in 1955, Held was in San Francisco. There he met and became involved with then actress (not yet performance artist) Yvonne Rainer. However, he found San Francisco a difficult place to work, as the surroundings were too beautiful. In addition, the other artists were very unfriendly and did not socialize with one another.(6) Held returned to New York with Yvonne Rainer and the two were married a year later and divorced in 1957.
In 1958/1959, Held switched from oil paint to acrylics after being introduced to this new paint by Sam Francis, an acquaintance from his Paris days. Francis also allowed Held to paint in his studio while Francis was traveling through Europe. This studio space was quite expansive with 16-foot high walls and large skylights. In response, he became inspired to paint with what he called “taxicab colors,” meaning straight pigments and no mixing of paints. This prompted a major change in his style, as his paintings became looser and larger, but the overall composition remained a tight rhythm of forms. To break away from this composition, Held decided not to repeat any single form on a canvas. He had his first solo gallery exhibition in New York at the Poindexter Gallery. In this same year, Held become involved with sculptor Sylvia Stone; they married ten years later in 1969.
Also at this time, the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited the first museum showing of Abstract Expressionist paintings, which then traveled throughout Europe. Held visited this exhibition several times while it was in New York, but had negative feelings towards it as a whole. He interpreted the work as being too surreal. For him there was nothing concrete or realistic in the subject matter, it was all too otherworldly for him. He saw no purpose in having “a spiritual overlay” to abstract paintings.(7) Simply because the imagery was abstract did not dictate that the meaning and purpose of the painting could not be realistic. Held wanted his paintings to be specific in shapes and color, wanting “the circle to appear as a circle, but to have the presence of a portrait of that circle rather than the personification of all circles.”(8) This circle would be the inside of the canvas and then he would proceed to painting other forms next to it, under it, or on it. The composition of a Held painting is kept together and structured through tension between the specific placement and size of each geometric form. Held’s desire to create paintings that were specific flowed into the naming of his works, as most all of his titles begin with “the.” In nearly all instances, he created titles once the painting is complete.(9) The importance of specificity and concrete subject matter stayed with Held throughout his career.
In 1962, Held was offered an Associate Professor of Art position at Yale University working with graduate students. He continued to live and paint in New York and commuted to Boston two to three days a week to teach. Teaching provided him with financial stability and a constant forum to discuss art practices and theories.(10) In 1964, he changed his gallery representation from Poindexter Gallery to André Emmerich Gallery, New York, and won the Frank G. Logan Medal from the Art Institute of Chicago. 1966 brought his next award, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in painting.
His paintings of the 1960s were oversized canvases and large planes of color akin to Color Field and Hard Edge paintings. The compositions were sparse with clear, hard edge geometric shapes. Yet, Held continued to apply paint in many heavy layers, as opposed to the thin staining layers of the Color Field and Hard Edge schools. In 1967, on the verge of creating works that were so sparse that the next level would be to move into Color Field Painting, Held decided he wanted to fracture the flatness of the picture plane with volume and depth.(11) This began a period of eliminating color to apply more focus on the specific geometric shapes and spatial relationships. Held worked with black backgrounds and white lines or vice versa. Black or white bands formed geometric shapes on the opposing background. When working black on white, the black lines would vary in thickness, from two inches to 1/16 of an inch, and were achieved by taping the edges.(12) He drew on the canvases with charcoal, which led to the thick black outline of geometric shapes on a white background.(13) Held also began to push the geometric shapes to the edges of the canvases, at times cropping the forms, but never the canvas, to give a sense of the image extending beyond the picture plane.(14) In 1968, Held had his first solo museum exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art, which then traveled to Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Several years later, in 1974, Held received his first retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, curated by Marcia Tucker. For most of the 1970s, Held created only black and white canvases. (A time when his process was dominated by taping, painting and sanding the canvases, making constant alterations.) In 1978, Held changed again, by reintroducing color into his work. He reverted back to flat primary colors, applied evenly to the canvas leaving a smooth surface with no trace of individual brushstrokes. In addition, Held enlarged his geometric forms, so the viewer could experience the color as well as the form.(15) Subsequently, a sense of perspective and spatial relationships between the geometric forms appeared in his works, similar to Op Art.(16) Held resigned from teaching in 1980. The following year he received a six-month residency at the American Academy, Rome, Italy. The following year he was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Academy. He returned almost every summer to Italy and eventually restored a farmhouse in the Tuscan town of Todi, Italy for a summer residence and studio. During the 1980s, Held introduced slight shifts in color in each geometric shape as a way to deepen the work’s space and further defy its two-dimensionality. His colors evolved beyond his ‘taxicab colors’ to include acid greens and yellows, purple reds, and the like. Also, a sense of order was introduced with the interlocking of the geometric forms, giving a ‘Renaissance-like space.’(17) Each form connected to the one next to it, and then to the composition as a whole. This spatial arrangement was influenced by the many early and High Renaissance paintings and frescoes that Held studied while in Rome.(18) In 1984, Held was elected to the American Institute of Arts and Letters.
The summer of 1989 brought Held’s first artist-in-residency at Crown Point Press, a contemporary print atelier in San Francisco, California. The prints created during his stay mirrored the paintings he was creating at the time with multi-toned and highlighted colors, and imagery that pushes out of the picture plane. He described his painting and print imagery as “…out to the edges. One of the ways I know a work is finished is when the whole image can almost visually lift off the canvas…[I] want the edges to be very tense.”(19) Held returned to Crown Point Press each summer from 1990 to 1992 and again in 1994. It was during the summer 1992 residency that Held created "The Space Between the Two." The early 1990s brought a subtle change to Held’s colors. The geometric objects no longer consisted of large flat planes of color. The colors changed into planes of varying tones and values of a specific primary color. This is illustrated in "The Space Between the Two" and other prints produced during his summer artist-in-residencies and in the paintings throughout the 1990s. Held’s prints were worked in a complex method during a one-hour period with five printers working simultaneously, a total of five person-hours for a single sheet.(20)
During the late 1990s, and continuing into the early 2000s, Held painted checkerboard and pseudo-houndstooth check patterns into the surfaces of his geometric forms. These forms also began to undulate, appearing like vast hills with definite horizon lines. The compositions seem like computer generated imaginary landscapes. However, Held continued to create his compositions by drawing, taping, paintings, sanding, and reworking directly on his canvases.(21) His last residency at Crown Point Press was in 1994. Held passed away in 2005 at the age of 77.
(1)The major biographical sources for the life of Al Held are, Richard Armstrong, Al Held (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1991); Irving Sandler, Al Held (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1984). (2)Armstrong, p. 6. (3)Cummings, Oral History Interview, p. 15. (4)bid. (5)Cummings, Oral History Interview, p. 57. (6)Cummings, Oral History Interview, pp. 45-46 (7)Cummings, Oral History Interview, pp. 60-61. (8)Cummings, Oral History Interview, p. 68. (9)Cummings, Oral History Interview, p. 75. (10)Sandler, p. 46. (11)Nancy Grimes, “Al Held: Reinventing Abstraction,” ARTnews, February 1988, p. 104. (12)Louis Finkelstein, “AL Held: Structure and the Intuition of Theme,” Art in America, November 1974, p. 86. (13)Cummings, Oral History Interview, p. 88. (14)Sandler, p. 68. (15)Sandler, p. 82. (16)Sandler, p. 73. (17)Constance Lewallen, “Al Held,” View, Winter 1989, p. 20. (18)Armstrong, p. 23.
(19) Lewallen, p. 14. (20)Kathan Brown, Painters and Sculptors at Crown Point Press: ink, paper, metal, wood, (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996.), p. 171. (21)Information regarding Held’s paintings from 1997 through 2001 was taken from press releases for his solo exhibitions, Al Held: Unfolding, October 21 – November 25, 2000, Robert Miller Gallery, New York, NY and Al Held, Watercolor Paintings, May 18 – July 7, 2001, Pillsbury Peters Fine Art, Dallas, TX. M.Pascucci 8/10/01
American
(New York, New York, 1928 - 2005, Todi, Italy)
Al Held was born in Brooklyn, New York on October 12, 1928 to Harry and Clara Held.(1) He was the older of two children born to immigrant Polish-Jewish parents. His father was a jeweler and his mother a housewife. His adolescent years were filled with skipping school and avoiding getting a job. On an almost daily basis he would go, by himself, to two double features a day at the 42nd Street theaters. While watching movies, “he became an acutely visual person, one who ingested information looking up at a grand silver rectangle on which larger-than-life images in black-and-white sped before his eyes.”(2) He was never interested in school, did not read books, newspapers, or magazines, nor did he ever visit an art museum. By 1944, he was expelled from school.
After being inundated with war propaganda through World War II, Held decided to join the Navy at age seventeen, in 1945. At this age, Held needed his parents’ signatures to join the Navy. He describes this as being somewhat of a scandalous act for a Jewish father; he likened it to his father giving away his only son and something not done in his family’s Jewish culture. In being sent to Virginia for training, Held made his first trip out of the state of New York.(3) During his two years of Naval service, he was stationed on a submarine in and around the Panama Canal. In 1947, Held was honorably discharged and eligible for the G.I. Bill support for education.
It was at this time Held began his association with art. He was raised in a very Socialist environment, so when a couple of kids from his parents’ neighborhood in the East Bronx asked him to go to Greenwich Village to build May Day floats, he accepted. It was while he was building May Day floats that he became acquainted with Folksay, a group involved with the Progressive presidential ticket of Henry Wallace. His involvement brought about a close friendship with another young Leftist, Nick Krushenick. Krushenick started going to the Art Students League and often spoke of the great paintings he was going to create. Krushenick’s drive and enthusiasm led Held, who had never visited a museum or seen a painting, to take an anatomy drawing class at the Art Students League. In 1948, Held enrolled in classes at the Art Students League during the day and supported himself by working in the school’s cafeteria at night. During his two years there, he studied with Kimon Nicolaides, Robert Beverly Hale, and Harry Sternberg. Toward the end of his first year, Sternberg decided Held lacked artistic talent and advised him to give up painting.
Fortunately Held ignored this advice and continued to study art. Becoming more deeply involved with Leftist politics and social realism, Held desired to study with an artist who shared his beliefs. Consequently, he left the Art Students League in 1950 to study in Mexico at the school of Mexican Muralist, David Alfarao Siquieros. However, Siquieros was arrested, sentenced to jail, and his school closed because of his radical social realist beliefs and actions. Still wanting to relocate out of New York, Held chose to go to Paris and study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiérie from 1950 through 1953. Held describes Paris as “a marvelous place in those days to paint out of New York.” He interprets this idea as wanting to learn how to draw the figure before tackling abstract painting and Jackson Pollock.(4) After studying the human figure, Held was inspired to combine the subjective of Pollock with the objective of Piet Mondrian to create a universal image, meaning that he dripped paint into confined geometric planes. In 1952, Held had his first solo gallery show with these works at Galerie Huit, a co-op gallery in Paris. However, he destroyed almost all of these canvases before leaving Paris.
He returned to New York in 1953, where he soon married Giselle Wexler and had a daughter, Mara. The marriage lasted just under two years. After his return to New York, Held’s work went through several changes; however, he continued to use abstract geometric forms as his subject matter. In the mid-1950s, he applied many thick layers of paint to his canvases in the mode of Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock and Franz Kline. His imagery consisted of geometric forms that were broken up and congealed into other abstract forms, all based in his desire “to give action painting some structure.”(5) For less than a year, in 1955, Held was in San Francisco. There he met and became involved with then actress (not yet performance artist) Yvonne Rainer. However, he found San Francisco a difficult place to work, as the surroundings were too beautiful. In addition, the other artists were very unfriendly and did not socialize with one another.(6) Held returned to New York with Yvonne Rainer and the two were married a year later and divorced in 1957.
In 1958/1959, Held switched from oil paint to acrylics after being introduced to this new paint by Sam Francis, an acquaintance from his Paris days. Francis also allowed Held to paint in his studio while Francis was traveling through Europe. This studio space was quite expansive with 16-foot high walls and large skylights. In response, he became inspired to paint with what he called “taxicab colors,” meaning straight pigments and no mixing of paints. This prompted a major change in his style, as his paintings became looser and larger, but the overall composition remained a tight rhythm of forms. To break away from this composition, Held decided not to repeat any single form on a canvas. He had his first solo gallery exhibition in New York at the Poindexter Gallery. In this same year, Held become involved with sculptor Sylvia Stone; they married ten years later in 1969.
Also at this time, the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited the first museum showing of Abstract Expressionist paintings, which then traveled throughout Europe. Held visited this exhibition several times while it was in New York, but had negative feelings towards it as a whole. He interpreted the work as being too surreal. For him there was nothing concrete or realistic in the subject matter, it was all too otherworldly for him. He saw no purpose in having “a spiritual overlay” to abstract paintings.(7) Simply because the imagery was abstract did not dictate that the meaning and purpose of the painting could not be realistic. Held wanted his paintings to be specific in shapes and color, wanting “the circle to appear as a circle, but to have the presence of a portrait of that circle rather than the personification of all circles.”(8) This circle would be the inside of the canvas and then he would proceed to painting other forms next to it, under it, or on it. The composition of a Held painting is kept together and structured through tension between the specific placement and size of each geometric form. Held’s desire to create paintings that were specific flowed into the naming of his works, as most all of his titles begin with “the.” In nearly all instances, he created titles once the painting is complete.(9) The importance of specificity and concrete subject matter stayed with Held throughout his career.
In 1962, Held was offered an Associate Professor of Art position at Yale University working with graduate students. He continued to live and paint in New York and commuted to Boston two to three days a week to teach. Teaching provided him with financial stability and a constant forum to discuss art practices and theories.(10) In 1964, he changed his gallery representation from Poindexter Gallery to André Emmerich Gallery, New York, and won the Frank G. Logan Medal from the Art Institute of Chicago. 1966 brought his next award, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in painting.
His paintings of the 1960s were oversized canvases and large planes of color akin to Color Field and Hard Edge paintings. The compositions were sparse with clear, hard edge geometric shapes. Yet, Held continued to apply paint in many heavy layers, as opposed to the thin staining layers of the Color Field and Hard Edge schools. In 1967, on the verge of creating works that were so sparse that the next level would be to move into Color Field Painting, Held decided he wanted to fracture the flatness of the picture plane with volume and depth.(11) This began a period of eliminating color to apply more focus on the specific geometric shapes and spatial relationships. Held worked with black backgrounds and white lines or vice versa. Black or white bands formed geometric shapes on the opposing background. When working black on white, the black lines would vary in thickness, from two inches to 1/16 of an inch, and were achieved by taping the edges.(12) He drew on the canvases with charcoal, which led to the thick black outline of geometric shapes on a white background.(13) Held also began to push the geometric shapes to the edges of the canvases, at times cropping the forms, but never the canvas, to give a sense of the image extending beyond the picture plane.(14) In 1968, Held had his first solo museum exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art, which then traveled to Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Several years later, in 1974, Held received his first retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, curated by Marcia Tucker. For most of the 1970s, Held created only black and white canvases. (A time when his process was dominated by taping, painting and sanding the canvases, making constant alterations.) In 1978, Held changed again, by reintroducing color into his work. He reverted back to flat primary colors, applied evenly to the canvas leaving a smooth surface with no trace of individual brushstrokes. In addition, Held enlarged his geometric forms, so the viewer could experience the color as well as the form.(15) Subsequently, a sense of perspective and spatial relationships between the geometric forms appeared in his works, similar to Op Art.(16) Held resigned from teaching in 1980. The following year he received a six-month residency at the American Academy, Rome, Italy. The following year he was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Academy. He returned almost every summer to Italy and eventually restored a farmhouse in the Tuscan town of Todi, Italy for a summer residence and studio. During the 1980s, Held introduced slight shifts in color in each geometric shape as a way to deepen the work’s space and further defy its two-dimensionality. His colors evolved beyond his ‘taxicab colors’ to include acid greens and yellows, purple reds, and the like. Also, a sense of order was introduced with the interlocking of the geometric forms, giving a ‘Renaissance-like space.’(17) Each form connected to the one next to it, and then to the composition as a whole. This spatial arrangement was influenced by the many early and High Renaissance paintings and frescoes that Held studied while in Rome.(18) In 1984, Held was elected to the American Institute of Arts and Letters.
The summer of 1989 brought Held’s first artist-in-residency at Crown Point Press, a contemporary print atelier in San Francisco, California. The prints created during his stay mirrored the paintings he was creating at the time with multi-toned and highlighted colors, and imagery that pushes out of the picture plane. He described his painting and print imagery as “…out to the edges. One of the ways I know a work is finished is when the whole image can almost visually lift off the canvas…[I] want the edges to be very tense.”(19) Held returned to Crown Point Press each summer from 1990 to 1992 and again in 1994. It was during the summer 1992 residency that Held created "The Space Between the Two." The early 1990s brought a subtle change to Held’s colors. The geometric objects no longer consisted of large flat planes of color. The colors changed into planes of varying tones and values of a specific primary color. This is illustrated in "The Space Between the Two" and other prints produced during his summer artist-in-residencies and in the paintings throughout the 1990s. Held’s prints were worked in a complex method during a one-hour period with five printers working simultaneously, a total of five person-hours for a single sheet.(20)
During the late 1990s, and continuing into the early 2000s, Held painted checkerboard and pseudo-houndstooth check patterns into the surfaces of his geometric forms. These forms also began to undulate, appearing like vast hills with definite horizon lines. The compositions seem like computer generated imaginary landscapes. However, Held continued to create his compositions by drawing, taping, paintings, sanding, and reworking directly on his canvases.(21) His last residency at Crown Point Press was in 1994. Held passed away in 2005 at the age of 77.
(1)The major biographical sources for the life of Al Held are, Richard Armstrong, Al Held (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1991); Irving Sandler, Al Held (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1984). (2)Armstrong, p. 6. (3)Cummings, Oral History Interview, p. 15. (4)bid. (5)Cummings, Oral History Interview, p. 57. (6)Cummings, Oral History Interview, pp. 45-46 (7)Cummings, Oral History Interview, pp. 60-61. (8)Cummings, Oral History Interview, p. 68. (9)Cummings, Oral History Interview, p. 75. (10)Sandler, p. 46. (11)Nancy Grimes, “Al Held: Reinventing Abstraction,” ARTnews, February 1988, p. 104. (12)Louis Finkelstein, “AL Held: Structure and the Intuition of Theme,” Art in America, November 1974, p. 86. (13)Cummings, Oral History Interview, p. 88. (14)Sandler, p. 68. (15)Sandler, p. 82. (16)Sandler, p. 73. (17)Constance Lewallen, “Al Held,” View, Winter 1989, p. 20. (18)Armstrong, p. 23.
(19) Lewallen, p. 14. (20)Kathan Brown, Painters and Sculptors at Crown Point Press: ink, paper, metal, wood, (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996.), p. 171. (21)Information regarding Held’s paintings from 1997 through 2001 was taken from press releases for his solo exhibitions, Al Held: Unfolding, October 21 – November 25, 2000, Robert Miller Gallery, New York, NY and Al Held, Watercolor Paintings, May 18 – July 7, 2001, Pillsbury Peters Fine Art, Dallas, TX. M.Pascucci 8/10/01
Artist Objects
