Al Held

Al Held ( born October 12, 1928 in Brooklyn, New York City, USA, † 27 July, 2005 Camerata in Todi, Italy ) was an American painter of abstract expressionism and one of the most important representatives of hard-edge painting, who was known for his large-scale geometric abstract paintings.

Life and work

Al Held showed in his youth no interest in art. It was only in 1947, inspired by his friend Nicholas Krushenick, he began at the Art Students League of New York to study. In 1949 he went to Paris for three years to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere. In 1953 he returned to New York.

After his first solo exhibition of abstract expressionist paintings in 1959, he started with colorful images, simple abstract geometric forms to create. With this work he gained increasing recognition in America and Europe. In 1962 he became a teacher at Yale University, School of Art until 1980.

In 1965 the critic Irving Sandler organized a major exhibition at New York University, with works by Al Held, Knox Martin, Ronald Bladen, George Sugarman and David Weinrib. In 1966, Hero was given a Guggenheim Fellowship and received the Logan Medal of the arts. In 1968, Al Held was represented with 5 Edge pictures of his large-format hardware on the documenta 4 in Kassel. He was also a participant of documenta 6 in 1977. Between 1967 and in the 1970s he created exclusively black and white images. Only in the late 1970s, he took back to the paint in his works.

In his later years his paintings were sold for sums of up to one million U.S. dollars. In 2005, he created large, colorful murals in the New York City subway system, between East 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue (Manhattan ). At the age of 76, on 27 July 2005 was found dead in the swimming pool Al Held his villa near Camerata in Todi, Italy. It starts from a natural death.

Literature and sources

• Exhibition catalog for Documenta IV: IV documentation. International Exhibition; Catalogue: Volume 1: ( painting and sculpture ); Volume 2: (graphics / objects ); Kassel 1968
• Kimpel, Harald / stem, Karin: documenta IV International Exhibition 1968 - A photographic reconstruction ( Series of the documenta - Archives); Bremen 2007, ISBN 978-3-86108-524-9