Al Held; Times of London obit (abstract painter)
Hyfler/Rosner
August 22, 2005, Monday
Al Held, abstract painter, was born on October 12, 1928. He
died on July 27, 2005, aged 76.
New York artist who simplified form to increase his
paintings' monumentality.
WHEN the young Al Held came back from Paris to his native
New York, he found himself hugely stimulated by the
overwhelming ferment of the art scene. The year was 1953,
and Jackson Pollock had already revolutionised the
possibilities for avant-garde painters in the US. Along with
Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and the other rebels loosely
described as Abstract Expressionists, Pollock made the next
generation eagerly aware that a new spirit of freedom was
transforming the language of art.
Born in 1928, Held went first to the Art Students League in
New York. But then, like so many aspiring contemporary
painters, he decided that the lure of Paris was
irresistible. He moved there in the early 1950s, studying at
the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and discovering a
kinship with artists as various as Nicolas de Stael, Hans
Hartung and Jean Dubuffet. They were all convinced, in their
different ways, that the process of painting was inherently
expressive. Held's first solo show was staged in Paris as
early as 1952, during this heady period of postwar
innovation. But his return to New York the following year
was prompted by the realisation that it had now become the
most vital, challenging centre for experimental art anywhere
in the Western world.
Here, at the age of 25, Held swiftly became a leading member
of the new generation. He exhibited in group shows at the
Tanager Gallery on East Tenth Street, where older artists
such as de Kooning and Philip Guston saw his work and got to
know him. Dore Ashton, a leading critic of the time, never
forgot encountering "the far wall in the Brata Gallery, an
artists' cooperative also on East Tenth Street in those
days, where several of Held's canvases so heavily charged
with richly tapestried earthen hues, built up to astonishing
heights, took total command. They were solid." The
fundamental vitality of paint's substance was arrestingly
conveyed in his early work, and the critic Irving Sandler
found hundred-pound sacks of pigment lying around Held's
studio.
But already, in these heaped and glowing images, he was
attempting to go beyond Pollock and his allies. "In the
heyday of Abstract Expressionism", Held explained later, "it
was the free-flowing paint. But one of my programmes then
was very pompous, I remember: to paraphrase Cezanne
consciously. I wanted to do to Abstract Expressionism what
Cezanne did to Impressionism." In other words, he aimed at
consolidating the achievements of the previous New York
generation by simplifying form, reducing the range of
colours and increasing his paintings' monumentality.
By 1960 he had succeeded, too. Along with some like-minded
artists, Held established an alternative approach. It was
given the label Post- Painterly Abstraction, yet other names
included Hard Edge, Cool Art and New Abstraction. Irving
Sandler, who became a prominent champion and exhibition
organiser for this movement around 1965, described Held's
work of the period as "Concrete Expressionism." He was
impressed by its growing rigidity, a kind of geometric
primitivism probably influenced by colossal US billboards
and the symbolic colour geometry of Amerindian art.
In 1967, though, Held surprised even his devotees by
jettisoning all involvement with colour apart from black and
white. Painting very forcefully, with black lines on a white
ground, he built up sequences of cubic forms. They seem to
jostle or collide with one another, fighting for pictorial
space. And they interpenetrate as well, adding to the sense
of conflict. The climax of these monumental works came in
1971, when Held's 30-metre-long mural was installed on the
Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York. He had always been
fascinated by an architectural sense of scale, and was here
given the opportunity to fulfil a much-cherished ambition.
The idea of struggle remained central to Held's development
as an artist. He thrived on reversals, dramatically going
against whatever resolution his work had just attained.
Hence his decision, in 1972, to place white lines on a black
ground. The cubic bodies appear to have been engraved on the
canvas. And they are accompanied, now, by circular forms.
Held varies the thickness of the lines defining them, so
that some of the heavier bodies seem to be surrounded by
misty, even ghostly, presences.
All through this period of intense and energetic activity,
from 1965 to 1979, Held was given regular solo exhibitions
at the prominent Andre Emmerich Gallery in New York. He also
held one-man shows with other dealers across Europe,
including Annely Juda Fine Art in London. Bigger exhibitions
were staged at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the San
Francisco Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American
Art in Manhattan. After the Art Institute of Chicago awarded
him the Logan Medal, the Guggenheim Museum gave Held a
Creative Painting Fellowship. He had work displayed in the
New York subway system, and his distinguished career as a
teacher was crowned when he became a professor at Yale
University.
But Held never became complacent about his own painting, or
slipped into smug formulae. He was a slow worker, and his
titanic canvases took a long time to complete. Held could
spend years on a single painting.
He never stopped astonishing his friends and admirers by
introducing sudden, drastic changes to his work. One of the
most seismic shifts occurred in 1979. Rich colours began to
invade his art again, ousting the austerity of monochrome
altogether.
The previous black and white paintings had all appeared
strikingly similar. But now, his heretical coloured
paintings looked utterly and bewilderingly different from
each other. The English critic Andrew Forge, now a
fellow-teacher at Yale, admitted that "to anyone who knows
Al Held's work of the last ten years, his new paintings will
come as a shock".
Immense architectural structures curve and slice through
these complex paintings, often enmeshing themselves in
cellular structures. Viewers felt that they were exploring
some mysterious universe, and Held never lost his passionate
belief in abstract painting's ability to create a sublime
new world.
Organised with immaculate precision, his late paintings no
longer rely on a theoretical programme at all. Revealingly,
Held's last New York exhibition at the Robert Miller Gallery
in 2003-04 was called Beyond Sense. He wanted to make images
of unfathomable places that nobody had ever experienced, and
his death in Italy at the age of 76 deprives contemporary
abstract art of an outstanding senior practitioner. Held's
body was discovered by his gardener in the swimming-pool of
the artist's house at Camerata, near Todi in Umbria.
After investigating the scene, Italian police reported that
he died of natural causes. Held had lived and worked a great
deal in the Todi area over the past couple of decades. He is
survived by a daughter, Mara Held, and a grandchild.