Al Held
American , 1928-2005

Brughes II, 1981
acrylic on canvas
84 x 84 in.

SBMA, Gift of Carol L. Valentine
1983.53

RESEARCH PAPER

Al Held was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1928, shortly before the depression. He grew up in a modest household and attended public schools. After serving three years in the Navy, he returned to New York to study art. From 1949 to 1953, Held studied at the Grand Chaumiere in Paris. Some young aspiring American painters then in Paris included George Sugarman, Bill River, and Sam Francis.

He returned to New York, and while developing his art, Held worked variously at road construction, carpentry and hauling. I think it is significant that the artist worked at these trades because they often required precision and clean, hard edges. These are two characteristics that are present in all of Held's work. Certainly, the nature of moving and hauling containers or boxes would have developed spatial skills. Held continued hauling work to support his wife and child until 1960.

In 1962, Held became an Associate Professor of Art at Yale University and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966. He also was awarded the Logan Medal from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1964. In 1982, Held was artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome. He has had one-man shows at the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He also exhibited in many galleries in the United States and Europe.

His three children are fully grown, and he and his wife Sylvia Stone, continue to work at their farm complex in Woodstock, New York.

Al Held began his career trying to synthesize the styles of two diverse artists. He found himself equally attracted to "Jackson Pollock's spontaneous technique and all over design and to Piet Mondrian's laboriously composed geometry" (Sandler,P.3) Although Held's works have undergone many transitions, characteristics of his art which have remained constant have been:
1) A precise, clean, hard edge
2) Geometric shapes
3) Spatial relationships

The last really major change in Held's work occurred in 1967. Undoubtedly Renaissance perspective, especially the illusion of space receding to a vanishing point must have influenced this change. Sharp focus, precision and illusion were all qualities of the 15th century Flemish painters which Held valued. During that time, to concentrate on linear shapes, he dropped using color.

The new works were painted with black lines on a white ground. His 1972 Flemish series reversed this relationship. He created geometric forms which float above eye level, below eye level, to the right, and to the left. Like Baroque works, no one figure seems to dominate. The shapes are interlocked and each part is essential to the whole.

When Held did return to color, his palette had changed and it now contained many brilliant pastel hues. "Brughes II". acquired by the Santa Barbara Art Museum in 1983, is a typical example.

In "Brughes II" the viewer feels as if he is thrust into an architectural construction of acid yellow and lime green girders. The girders rush in a changing sequence to dual vanishing points located outside and on either side of the painting. The spacial aspect of the diagonal lines is created by varying the thickness of the line rather than by any gradation of color. The color remains constant whether in the foreground or receding into the distance. The strength of the vertical columns is robbed by the distraction of the diagonals. Furthermore, in the lower portion of the painting the artists has placed circles or hoops of vivid red and purple. All these forms resemble computer graphics. These giant circles and three dimensional boxes play peek-a-boo with the girders. The vertical girders near the left hand edge are perceived as being straight, but closer examination reveals that they converge together. Lastly, the background is divided into three bands. Light turquoise is at the top, medium blue is in the middle, and lavender at the bottom.

How does Held create his paintings and what do the markings on the sides of the unframed canvas indicate? When asked, the artist said in an interview, "First I photo. Then I trace the lines, but it's not exact enough, so it's only an aid, not a blueprint. The photo tells me where color should go. I use a foam brush instead of bristles, so I get a flatter application of paint than with sable or bristles. Masking tape helps me to get a sharper edge. I key what I want to do around the edge of the canvas, marking the colors with a code, having established roughly how I want the surface to be. Then I sand the surface design away, stage by stage, repainting it accurately. You can still see around the edge of a finished canvas, my pencil code marks, even though they have been superseded by the completed picture." (Hughes, P. 81)

Though the artist has stated that he abhors 'decorative art', anyone looking at "Brughes II" cannot but be struck by its beauty. The energy generated by the constant changing set of visual relationships makes this art exciting and challenging to the viewer.

Written for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Jennifer Potts, 1984
Prepared for the Website by Eunice Drell, February 2004

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Emanuel, Muriel, et al, Contemporary Artist, St. Martins Press, 1977
Glaser, David,"Al Held's Strategy of Structural Conflict", Arts Magazine, vol. 57, no. 5, January 1983, pp. 82-83
Hughes,Graham, "New York: Interview of al Held", Arts Review, Vol 34, pt. 5, February 26, 1982, p. 81
Sandler, Irving, "Individual Character and Presence: Al Held's Painting, 1959-1961", Arts Magazine, Vol. 54, No. 8, April 1980, pp. 186-187.
------------, "Portraits and Puzzles", Newsweek, Vol. 99, apr 5, 1982, pp 79-80.

COMMENTS

AL HELD, PAINTER OF GEOMETRIC COMPLEXITIES, DIES AT 76

Al Held, an American painter widely recognized for his often immense geometric abstractions, died on Tuesday at his home in Todi, Italy. He was 76.

He was found in his swimming pool, but his dealer, Betsy Wittenborn Miller of the Robert Miller Gallery in New York, said the cause of death had not been determined.

During his five-decade career, Mr. Held concentrated on the formal properties of painting, but his work evolved in surprising ways from an aggressively materialist approach in the early years to the visionary geometric fantasies that he made from the late 1970's on In the 50's, he created extremely thick, richly colored patchwork compositions. In the 60's, finessing the gap between Minimalism and Color Field painting, he produced smooth, simplified works based on enlarged letters of the alphabet. And in the late 60's and 70's he made complex black-and-white pictures of sharply outlined cubes, pyramids and other geometric shapes floating in illusory spaces of indeterminate depth. Mr. Held returned to color in the next decade and his pictures became more and more complex and expansive. Configurations of vibrantly colored and patterned grids, spheres, rings and columns harked back to the Italian Baroque -- the architectural fantasies of Piranesi, for example -- while suggesting a kind of futuristic techno-psychedelic experience. Many viewers wondered if he composed his late pictures using computer software, but he did not. He had assistants, but all his works were made painstakingly by hand. Alvin Jacob Held was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 12, 1928. After being asked to leave high school because of chronic truancy, he joined the United States Navy in 1945. Leaving the service two years later, he became friends with people interested in leftist politics and art, and in 1948 he began taking courses at the Art Students League. From 1950 to 1953, with money from the G.I. Bill of Rights, Mr. Held studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where the Russian-born sculptor Ossip Zadkine was one of his teachers. He had his first solo exhibition in 1952 at Galerie Huit in Paris and his second solo show in 1959 at the Poindexter Gallery in New York. Mr. Held lived in New York until the mid-90's and then divided his time between homes in Boiceville, N.Y., and Todi. Mr. Held was included in major museum exhibitions devoted to contemporary painting throughout the 60's and into the 70's. From 1960 to 1980 he taught in the art department of Yale University, where he was valued as a challenging and demanding teacher by many students, like Judy Pfaff, who went on to have significant careers of their own. With the resurgence of representational painting and political art in the 80's, Mr. Held's work came to be viewed as less central to mainstream developments, and yet it was during later decades that he produced some of the most ambitious works of his career. Many of those paintings were too big to fit even into a large commercial gallery. For example, one work, a triptych titled ''Requiem'' measuring 15 feet high and more than 60 feet across, was not seen by the public until the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens included it in a 2002 exhibition. At his death, Mr. Held was working on commissions for mural paintings for the Jacksonville Public Library in Florida; stained-glass windows for the Federal District Court in Orlando, Fla.; and a mosaic for the subway stop at Lexington Avenue and 53rd Street in Manhattan, where a major section can already be seen. Mr. Held's marriages to Giselle Wexler, the filmmaker and dancer Yvonne Rainer, the sculptor Sylvia Stone and Kathleen Monahan ended in divorce. He is survived by his companion, Pamela Gagliani of Todi; his daughter, Mara Held of Brooklyn; and one grandchild.

- Ken Johnson, New York Times Obituary, July 29, 2005