When the young Al Held came back from Paris to his native New York, he found himself hugely stimulated by the overwhelming ferment of the art scene. The year was 1953, and Jackson Pollock had already revolutionised the possibilities for avant-garde painters in the US. Along with Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and the other rebels loosely described as Abstract Expressionists, Pollock made the next generation eagerly aware that a new spirit of freedom was transforming the language of art.

Born in 1928, Held went first to the Art Students League in New York. But then, like so many aspiring contemporary painters, he decided that the lure of Paris was irresistible. He moved there in the early 1950s, studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and discovering a kinship with artists as various as Nicolas de Stael, Hans Hartung and Jean Dubuffet. They were all convinced, in their different ways, that the process of painting was inherently expressive. Held’s first solo show was staged in Paris as early as 1952, during this heady period of postwar innovation. But his return to New York the following year was prompted by the realisation that it had now become the most vital, challenging centre for experimental art anywhere in the Western world.

Here, at the age of 25, Held swiftly became a leading member of the new generation. He exhibited in group shows at the Tanager Gallery on East Tenth Street, where older artists such as de Kooning and Philip Guston saw his work and got to know him. Dore Ashton, a leading critic of the time, never forgot encountering “the far wall in the Brata Gallery, an artists’ cooperative also on East Tenth Street in those days, where several of Held’s canvases so heavily charged with richly tapestried earthen hues, built up to astonishing heights, took total command. They were solid.” The fundamental vitality of paint’s substance was arrestingly conveyed in his early work, and the critic Irving Sandler found hundred-pound sacks of pigment lying around Held’s studio.

But already, in these heaped and glowing images, he was attempting to go beyond Pollock and his allies. “In the heyday of Abstract Expressionism”, Held explained later, “it was the free-flowing paint. But one of my programmes then was very pompous, I remember: to paraphrase Cézanne consciously. I wanted to do to Abstract Expressionism what Cézanne did to Impressionism.” In other words, he aimed at consolidating the achievements of the previous New York generation by simplifying form, reducing the range of colours and increasing his paintings’ monumentality. By 1960 he had succeeded, too. Along with some like-minded artists, Held established an alternative approach. It was given the label Post- Painterly Abstraction, yet other names included Hard Edge, Cool Art and New Abstraction. Irving Sandler, who became a prominent champion and exhibition organiser for this movement around 1965, described Held’s work of the period as “Concrete Expressionism.” He was impressed by its growing rigidity, a kind of geometric primitivism probably influenced by colossal US billboards and the symbolic colour geometry of Amerindian art.

In 1967, though, Held surprised even his devotees by jettisoning all involvement with colour apart from black and white. Painting very forcefully, with black lines on a white ground, he built up sequences of cubic forms. They seem to jostle or collide with one another, fighting for pictorial space. And they interpenetrate as well, adding to the sense of conflict. The climax of these monumental works came in 1971, when Held’s 30-metre-long mural was installed on the Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York. He had always been fascinated by an architectural sense of scale, and was here given the opportunity to fulfil a much-cherished ambition.

The idea of struggle remained central to Held’s development as an artist. He thrived on reversals, dramatically going against whatever resolution his work had just attained. Hence his decision, in 1972, to place white lines on a black ground. The cubic bodies appear to have been engraved on the canvas. And they are accompanied, now, by circular forms. Held varies the thickness of the lines defining them, so that some of the heavier bodies seem to be surrounded by misty, even ghostly, presences.

All through this period of intense and energetic activity, from 1965 to 1979, Held was given regular solo exhibitions at the prominent Andre Emmerich Gallery in New York. He also held one-man shows with other dealers across Europe, including Annely Juda Fine Art in London. Bigger exhibitions were staged at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan. After the Art Institute of Chicago awarded him the Logan Medal, the Guggenheim Museum gave Held a Creative Painting Fellowship. He had work displayed in the New York subway system, and his distinguished career as a teacher was crowned when he became a professor at Yale University.

But Held never became complacent about his own painting, or slipped into smug formulae. He was a slow worker, and his titanic canvases took a long time to complete. Held could spend years on a single painting.

He never stopped astonishing his friends and admirers by introducing sudden, drastic changes to his work. One of the most seismic shifts occurred in 1979. Rich colours began to invade his art again, ousting the austerity of monochrome altogether.

The previous black and white paintings had all appeared strikingly similar. But now, his heretical coloured paintings looked utterly and bewilderingly different from each other. The English critic Andrew Forge, now a fellow-teacher at Yale, admitted that “to anyone who knows Al Held’s work of the last ten years, his new paintings will come as a shock”.

Immense architectural structures curve and slice through these complex paintings, often enmeshing themselves in cellular structures. Viewers felt that they were exploring some mysterious universe, and Held never lost his passionate belief in abstract painting’s ability to create a sublime new world.

Organised with immaculate precision, his late paintings no longer rely on a theoretical programme at all. Revealingly, Held’s last New York exhibition at the Robert Miller Gallery in 2003-04 was called Beyond Sense. He wanted to make images of unfathomable places that nobody had ever experienced, and his death in Italy at the age of 76 deprives contemporary abstract art of an outstanding senior practitioner. Held’s body was discovered by his gardener in the swimming-pool of the artist’s house at Camerata, near Todi in Umbria.

After investigating the scene, Italian police reported that he died of natural causes. Held had lived and worked a great deal in the Todi area over the past couple of decades. He is survived by a daughter, Mara Held, and a grandchild.







Al Held, abstract painter, was born on October 12, 1928. He died on July 27, 2005, aged 76.