Noah’s Focus II

A pioneer of hard-edged abstraction, American painter Al Held (b. 1928; d. 2005) was one of the leading figures in the Second Generation of the New York School. Like most of his cohort he went through gestural abstraction in his early years, with canvases densely packed with layers of oil mixed from dry pigment. He later switched to acrylic paint, a fast-drying medium that allowed him to be more experimental. His forms became more geometric and sharp, while his scale grew in size to extreme dimensions. By the end of the 1950s, Held and his contemporaries, including Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella, began to explore other pictorial alternatives beyond Abstract Expressionism, which advanced their interest into non-objective painting.

Held’s paintings from the early 1960s, such as his Alphabet Paintings series (1961–67), were concrete abstractions composed of flat colors and geometric forms in large-scale formats. He participated in seminal exhibitions such as Geometric Abstraction in America, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1962); Toward a New Abstraction, The Jewish Museum, New York (1963); Post Painterly Abstraction, Los Angeles County Museum (1964); and Systemic Painting, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1966). Towards the end of the decade, however, Held began to restrict his palette to black and white to explore space and volume through interconnected geometric forms with varying vanishing points. His shapes became more defined by sharp thick black outlines, cropped at the edges of the canvas so they appeared to extend beyond the plane. This effect conjured an open volumetric field of space that demanded his paintings to be seen and understood spatially. In 1966, he had his first museum exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Later, in 1968, he had another solo museum show at the San Francisco Museum of Art, followed by an additional one at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. By the late 1970s, his palette returned to a rich and colorful spectrum, and by the end of his career Held created profound spaces inspired by Renaissance art and theoretical physics.