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Al Held (1928-2005)

Professions: Painter

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    Al Held (1928-2005)

    Al Held (1928-2005)

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    Al Held (1928-2005)

    Al Held (1928-2005)

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    Al Held (1928-2005)

    Al Held (1928-2005)

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    AL HELD

    AL HELD

Al Held Biography

(b New York, 12 Oct 1928). American painter. He was in Paris from 1950 to 1952, along with Ellsworth Kelly, George Sugarman, Jack Youngerman (b 1926) and Sam Francis. On his return to New York he made contact with Abstract Expressionist painters, painting in a subdued, impressionistic manner. The hard-edge paintings that developed from these works were partly a reaction to painterly rhetoric, but were remarkable for their forceful presence, the effect of robust simplicity and mammoth scale, with alphabet forms seeming to expand beyond the limits of the canvas. In 1967 he rejected the flatness, symmetry and strictures against illusionism that at the time dominated American painting and embarked on the diagrammatic reinterpretation of Cubism that over the next 20 years was to be refined into a sophisticated abstract style. By 1974 he had established a linear vocabulary that contrasted inscribed circles with the thicker bars of cubes or prisms, initially in black and white and later in colour. These geometric solids, appearing by turns opaque, transparent, or as impossible fictions, presented a peculiarly abstract space, the world of planetary motions or equally of molecular structure. Despite their clean-cut look, the paintings originated in loose painterly improvisation, with all the re-working erased by an electric sander. In his distrust of theory and his insistence that order must be won from chaos, Held thus maintained in his own style the ethic of Abstract Expressionism.

Grove Art excerpts - Electronic ©2003, Oxford Art Online

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