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Al HeldRUSSELL'S WAY1989
1989
About the Item
In excellent condition from an edition of 50, this piece is beautifully framed in museum-quality materials. Al Held is best remembered for his large-scale paintings of bright, hard-edged geometries that embrace depth and spatial illusion. Yet throughout his 50-year career, the artist cycled through many styles and movements. After studying at the Art Students League in New York—where he adopted a figurative style inspired by Social Realism—and at the Académie de la Grand Chaumière in Paris, Held embraced the gestural approach of New York’s Abstract Expressionist scene. He found mentors in Mark Rothko and Franz Kline. In the late 1960s, Held began to challenge the flatness of many modernist painting styles, breaking up the picture plane with suggestions of deep space and three-dimensional form. He worked exclusively in black and white for nearly a decade before reintroducing eye-popping color into his canvases. His work has sold for six figures on the secondary market and belongs in the 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, the Tate, the Kunsthaus Zürich, and the Kunstmuseum Basel.
- Creator:Al Held (1928 - 2005, American)
- Creation Year:1989
- Dimensions:Height: 35.25 in (89.54 cm)Width: 44.5 in (113.03 cm)Depth: 0.2 in (5.08 mm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Framing:Frame IncludedFraming Options Available
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Three Oaks, MI
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU517310223422
Al Held
Alvin Jacob Held, (1928-2005) Al Held earned his slot in the annals of American contemporary art with his bold, geometric canvases that took abstraction to another level. His free-floating, interlocked cubes, and planes invited the viewer into a vertigo-inducing landscape that seemed to stretch on into infinity. "Immense architectural structures curve and slice through these complex paintings, often enmeshing themselves in cellular structures," noted the Times of London. "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."
Held grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and as a teenager, missed so many days of high school that it was suggested he consider leaving altogether. He eventually earned a night-school diploma, and spent two years in the U.S. Navy. Back in New York City, he enrolled in classes at the Art Students League, and went on to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris in the early 1950s. The first solo exhibition of his work was staged there, in 1952 at the Galerie Huit. Held's abstract work took on a more orderly, formal tone, aided by a switch from oil to acrylic paints in 1959, and he had his first solo show in New York City that same year at the Poindexter Gallery. "Finessing the gap between Minimalism and Color Field painting," wrote New York Times journalist Ken Johnson of the next decade of Held's career, "he produced smooth, simplified works based on enlarged letters of the alphabet. And in the late '60s and '70s he made complex black-and-white pictures of sharply outlined cubes, pyramids, and other geometric shapes floating in illusory spaces of indeterminate depth."
Some of Held's best-known works are those floating black and white cubes, a series he began in 1967. One of the largest, which stretches more than 90 feet in length, was installed at the Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York. In the late 1970s, in an abrupt shift, he began using color again, and the geometric shapes became so precise that they were sometimes mistaken for computer-generated art. Held considered his images not unlike those of religious art, once telling an interviewer that "historically, the priests and wise men believed that it was the artist's job to make images of heaven and hell believable, even though nobody had experienced these places," he said, according to his Chicago Tribune obituary.
Held spent 20 years teaching at Yale University's. Represented by the Robert Miller Gallery in New York City, which staged what would be his last exhibition of new work in 2003, Held's works were avidly sought by contemporary-art enthusiasts around the world, and were part of the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. — Carol Brennan
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