Al Held, modernist and abstract painter, 76
deb...@comcast.net
By Associated Press
ROME -- Al Held, a U.S. modernist and abstract painter best known for
his large-scale paintings, was found dead Wednesday in his house in
central Italy, a friend said. He was 76.
Held was found dead in his swimming pool in the Umbrian town of Todi,
Bill Pepper said. The cause of death has not been determined, he said.
Held, a native of New York City, was considered a leading member of the
Minimalist School of painting and held exhibits in both Europe and the
United States. He had been living in Italy for the past two decades,
Pepper said.
Held moved to Paris in the early 1950s for his first solo show in 1952.
His works include colossal paintings and canvasses filled with colored
geometric shapes.
"Scientists talk about vast worlds and universes that the senses cannot
experience. The purpose of the nonobjective artist is to create these
images," Held once said of his works.
His works went on display at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York in
2000 and in the city's subway system.
Held is survived by a daughter and a grandchild. Funeral plans were not
announced.
Hoodoo
Washington Post
July 28, 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/metro/obituaries/index.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/postphotos/orb/metro/2005-07-28/11.htm
Al Held, who died at 76, maintained a commitment to abstraction
throughout his career. (Robert Miller Gallery - Robert Miller
Gallery)
Al Held, 76, an American artist who painted large-scale abstract
works that contained a dizzying array of perspectives and optical
effects, was found dead July 27, floating in a swimming pool at
his villa near Camerata, Italy. The cause of death was not
reported, but Italian police said he died of natural causes.
A streetwise New Yorker and Navy veteran, Mr. Held embodied a
number of contradictions in his art and life. He was a high
school dropout who became a professor at Yale University. He was
well schooled in the classical tradition of Western art yet
worked in an abstract style that suggested the time-warp universe
of space flight. Without using computers, he brought a
mathematical precision to the exuberant, loosely disciplined
abstract expressionist style.
Mr. Held would spend as much as three years on one of his
large-scale works, which sometimes measured more than 30 feet in
length. Without belonging to any particular school of painting,
he touched on several styles, from abstract expressionism to op
art, illusionism, minimalism and hard-edge.
Anything but self-revelatory, Mr. Held's art was built on visual
liveliness and density for its own sake. He used straight edges,
masking tape and multiple coats of evenly applied paint to create
works with intersecting lines, overlapping circles, triangles and
other geometric figures. With subtle splashes of color and
illusions of three-dimensional depth, the paintings could, in the
words of one critic, be "disorienting to the point of vertigo."
Writing in ArtNews magazine in 1988, critic Nancy Grimes called
Mr. Held's work "a refreshing alternative to Abstract
Expressionism's tormented vision of an imperiled self."
He struggled in his early years, holding down blue-collar jobs
while finding his artistic voice. But when he developed his
geometric form of abstraction -- blending the randomly dripped
paintings of Jackson Pollock with the meticulously ordered
canvases of Piet Mondrian -- Mr. Held found a formula that served
him well.
"The best abstract painting transforms its formal qualities into
metaphors for truths unavailable to direct perception," he said.
He recently had completed an underground mural in the New York
subway system at East 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue and was
working on other murals in Florida and elsewhere. Busy until the
end, Mr. Held could command more than $1 million for his more
monumental works. He felt proprietary about his paintings long
after they were completed and would oversee a team of artists
whenever his murals needed touching up.
One of his larger pieces, measuring 16 feet high and more than 50
feet wide, is "Mantegna's Edge" (1983), originally done for an
office building in Dallas and housed in the entry of the Boca
Raton Museum of Art in Florida.
"Three of four weeks ago, I got a call from the front desk,
saying there was a man in the museum who was touching the
painting," said George S. Bolge, the museum's executive director.
"When the guard explained that he couldn't touch it, he said, 'It
belongs to me.'
"I came down, and it was Al. We went across the street and had a
couple of drinks."
Mr. Held was born Oct. 12, 1928, in Brooklyn, N.Y., and moved to
the Bronx in his early teens. Kicked out of high school at 16 for
truancy, he later received a diploma from night school. After two
years in the Navy, he returned to New York and got caught up in a
circle of leftist artists and activists.
In 1948, he entered the Art Students League without ever having
set foot in a museum. His works hang in the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of
American Art in New York and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden in Washington.
He studied in Paris and San Francisco in the early 1950s, then
worked several years as a carpenter, truck driver, construction
worker and mover. In 1959, when he switched from oil paint to
acrylic, he began to experiment more freely with geometric
patterns in his work.
From 1967 to 1978, he worked exclusively in black and white
before reintroducing accents of color. He worked on his large
canvases at his home in Briceville, N.Y., and spent summers in
Italy, where he painted watercolors. Throughout his career, he
maintained an allegiance to abstract art, which he considered the
highest state of painting.
"He was incredibly intelligent and thoughtful about the meaning
of abstraction," said Richard Lytle, an artist who taught at Yale
with Mr. Held. "He felt when any artists gave up on abstraction,
they were giving up the faith."
Mr. Held's marriages to Giselle Wexler, Yvonne Raier and Sylvia
Stone ended in divorce.
Survivors include a daughter from the first marriage.
--
It's a big old goofy world. - John Prine