held_hampton

Al Held (American 1928-2005)

Born in Brooklyn in 1928, Al Held was the son of Polish-Jewish working class parents. He dropped out of school in 1944 at the age of 16 and joined the Navy the following year. Once out of the Navy, Held found himself drifting toward the leftist politics of his parents and become a member of the folk singling group, Folksay. Inspired by the students in Folksay, Held decided to attend night classes to earn a diploma and become a social worker. It was a friendship with Nicolas Krushenick who attended the Art Student League that sparked an interest in art for Held, and he enrolled in a summer anatomy class. By the end of summer he enrolled full time as an art student at the League.

Held began to visit numerous galleries and museums, discovering the work of Jackson Pollock. He was fascinated by Pollock’s large drip paintings and felt a particular connection to the action and dynamic energy of his canvases. Yet this caused a conflict between his growing socialist ideals of working for the people, and individualistic personal gesture of Abstract Expressionism. Held decided to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiére in Paris in 1949, where he found freedom in pursuing the art practice of his choice. He no longer felt torn between politics and art and instead opened himself up to the influences of Abstract Expressionism in his artists drive.

The gesture remained present in Held's work on return to the U.S., but by the late 1950’s there was an obvious change. He began to work with encaustic and at times even making his own pigments and paints and often met with both Mark Rothko and Franz Kline to discuss painting. Held’s paintings were large in scale and in contrast to the nature of gestural painting, began to explore notions of structure and logic. Throughout the 1960’s Held began to leave the gesture behind and move more towards geometric and precise form using letters of the alphabet and even the Greek alphabet using circles and triangles.

By the late 1960’s Held left out all color and created his black and white series, comprised of complete and incomplete cubes layered over one another to create an illusion of depth and more specifically revealing Held’s interest in the relationship of perception and perspective. He developed this aesthetic further throughout the 1970’s making his compositions more complex and illusionistic. By the late 1970’s and early 1980’s Held brought back color once again, this time combining not just geometric forms, but also planes of color. Spending the summer of 1980 in Rome, Held looked to the art of the Renaissance taking into use notions of vertical and horizontal lines in architecture. It is the lessons he learns and adapts in Rome, where he later takes residence in 1988, that become an integral part to Held’s late work, where he continues to participate in a dialogue of perspective, shape, form, and space within his paintings.

Held was a professor at Yale University from 1962 to 1980 and exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions including the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, New York. He was also the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966.