From AbEx to Space X, six decades of Held’s heroic abstractions reconsidered
by Lilly Wei
D-Y, 1979, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 84 in.
© Al Held Foundation, Inc. Photo © Al Held Foundation, Inc. Courtesy White Cube.
Al Held is having a moment—again. Best known for his punchy, hard-edged geometric abstractions, often prodigiously scaled, Held was always a contender in the New York art world (and beyond) although his work never quite received the critical acclaim it deserved, at odds with the prevailing commandments (Thou shalt worship flatness at the top of the list) haloing advanced art as laid down by critic Clement Greenberg. But with the renewed interest in abstraction—of the third kind, Held’s kind, one that deployed geometric forms in novel ways that included implications of the representational (or not)—he and his prescient, against-the-grain, eye-jolting paintings are finally aligned with the Zeitgeist, a swipe-right match for our post-millennial age. That substantial uptick in visibility includes “Al Held: About Space,” a welcome survey exhibition of the artist’s works at London’s White Cube Bermondsey this summer, reviewing more than five decades of his career, highlighted by key works from several of his groundbreaking series. Daniel Belasco, the executive director of the Al Held Foundation, said, “The culture is finally catching up with Held,” citing that resurgence as well as the current popularity of speculative art, speculative fiction. “Held,” he continued, “was extraordinarily optimistic and always saw so many possibilities in the future and believed that we humans have always had the ability to create a better world for ourselves.”
Eagle Rock IV, 2004, acrylic on canvas, 180 x 360 in.
© Al Held Foundation, Inc. Photo © White Cube (Ollie Hammick).
Held was born in Brooklyn in 1928, followed by a stint in the Bronx as a teenager—an outer borough kid who grew up under hard circumstances during hard times, without much cushioning. He was independent—the word “maverick” pops up often when referring to him—a jack of many trades through necessity as well as the propulsive curiosity of native intelligence, his intuition shaped by his empiricism. A born contrarian, he loved a good argument and could be stubborn, tenacious. He could also be empathetic, encouraging, and generous, if demanding, as he was with the many students he taught at Yale from 1963–1980, influencing several generations of artists. Expelled from high school for chronic truancy before graduating, not a promising start, Held later found it humorous that, without a degree, he was teaching at one of America’s elite educational institutions.
At 17, he enlisted in the Navy, soon after World War II ended. Two years later, returning to New York, he enrolled at the Art Students League, aided by money from the G.I. Bill, a leftist in politics and art, becoming a social realist painter, and an ardent admirer of the Mexican muralists, particularly David Alfaro Siqueiros. While at the Art Students League, an instructor suggested he might do better pursuing another vocation but Held, obviously, did not quit. He then attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where he spent two years in the company of a cohort of American artists who had flocked there, among them Sam Francis, George Sugarman, and Ed Clark, as well as Jean-Paul Riopelle, Georges Duthuit, and others. His first solo exhibition was at Galerie Huit, an artist cooperative, in which he showed thickly painted abstractions indebted to Jackson Pollock but were more focused on structure than gesture, even then. Held said, in a 1987 conversation with American art critic Irving Sandler, that he wanted to take Cézanne’s ideas and use them to save “Abstract Expressionism by trying to give it some kind of structure” by taking its gestural movements and building structural elements into them. Impact and structure were, from the beginning, the keystones of his practice, from the early pigmented abstractions to his visionary last works, informed by Cézanne’s famous maxim, to treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone through every stage of his practice.