American (1928-2005)

Most widely known for his role as a pioneer of hard-edge abstraction, American painter Al Held experimented ceaselessly, pursuing a career marked by continual reinvention. Born in Brooklyn in 1928 and raised in the East Bronx, Held served in the U.S. Navy from 1945 to 1947 before turning seriously to art in the late 1940s, with a specific interest in becoming a painter of social realist murals. First studying at the Art Students League in New York, Held enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris in 1951, with support from the G.I. Bill.

In Paris, Held abandoned realism in favor of abstraction, exhibiting his work at the artist-run Galerie Huit in 1952 before returning to New York the following year. There, he entered the orbit of the burgeoning Abstract Expressionist movement, and his paintings of the 1950s reflected its influence through heavily worked surfaces, gestural brushwork, and an emphasis on the physical act of painting. Held received his first New York solo exhibition in 1959 and, in the early 1960s, his abstractions would become increasingly concrete.

In 1963, Held joined the faculty of the Yale School of Art, where he taught painting and drawing until 1980. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966 and, the following year, abandoned color in his work entirely in a shift that was met with mixed reactions from critics. He would continue to work in a palette of exclusive black and white until the late 1970s, when he began to reintroduce exuberant color. Despite Held’s many stylistic shifts, his “persistent drive for architectural scale” remained a throughline throughout his career, according to the Guggenheim Museum.

Held's work has been exhibited widely during his career and after. Today, Held’s works are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Tate, among others.