In the late 1940s, Held availed himself of the GI Bill to pursue his artistic studies, first enrolling at the Art Students League in New York then venturing to Paris to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He returned to New York in 1953 to a city in the thrall of Abstract Expressionism, encountering first-hand the impact effected by artists such as Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock. Although closely associated with the movement, and often considered a leading figure of its second generation, Held notably eschewed art critic Clement Greenberg’s insistence on ‘flatness’ as a criterion of modernist painting. Instead, Held forged a singular path, endeavouring to concretise volume and space.

In a 1987 discussion with American art critic Irving Sandler, the artist recalled resonating with the ‘Cézanne axiom of trying to give Impressionism structure.’[2] Motivated by a desire to introduce structure to the nebulous forms characteristic of Abstract Expressionism, he developed his series of ‘Taxi Cab’ paintings (1959–60). Following his paint-laden ‘Pigment’ works, the ‘Taxi Cabs’ marked a pivotal moment in the artist’s practice, the shift from oil paint to the faster-drying polymer-based acrylic affording Held the freedom to repaint his canvases several times over. In the expansive 23-foot-wide Taxi Cab IV (1959), displayed in South Gallery I, rudimentary geometric configurations emerge through Held’s broad-brushed handling of his medium. Rendered in bold, primary colours, the buoyant and off-kilter shapes evoke the pandemonic throng of traffic in his native city, as implied by the title.

The artist’s ‘urge for specificity’ soon evolved into the ‘Alphabet Paintings’ (1961–67), a series of mural-sized works in which Held isolated letters of the Roman alphabet, delineating them with serrated edges of colour. In paintings such as I Beam (1961), Held harnesses the typographic and pictorial quality of the letters to probe and concretise form, looking beyond their signifying function in order to eliminate a reading of the work. Expansive in scale, the armatures of the letters extend beyond the threshold of the picture plane, amplifying their status as objects that possess a physical presence.

By 1967, Held was ready to explore new realms of dimensionality. Drawing on his prior endeavours to transcend the planar surface of the canvas through built-up oil paint, he sought to aggregate more information within pictorial space, marking the start of a decade-long series known as the ‘Black and White’ paintings. Eschewing colour, works such as Esopus I (1969) and Black Nile VII (1974) are structured around the cubic volumes of elemental shapes. Delineating the geometries of squares, circles and triangles with bold, interpenetrating lines that extend beyond the image-field, Held displaces the parameters of cubic dimension to introduce unmoored and paradoxical perspectives.

Sensing that he had interrogated the possibilities of the ‘Black and White’ genre to its fullest extent, Held reintroduced colour to his practice in the summer of 1978. Pastel and neon hues suffuse these new paintings to help distinguish planes and perspectives in his increasingly complex and expansive compositions. Displayed in the North Galleries, five seminal works from Held’s ‘Return to Colour’ series (1978–84) manifest matrixed configurations of ‘gravity-less’ geometric forms and interlocking trellised beams. Within groundless fields of colour, Held here introduces a deepened sense of space through the interplay of light and shadow and compositions with architectural dimension – all of which laid the foundation for the artist’s subsequent and perhaps most ambitious series.

During the final two decades of his life, Held pioneered new realms of virtual space. Coinciding with the formative technological advancements emerging in the 1980s, Held’s ‘Luminous Constructs’ (1985–2005) and watercolour paintings – three of which find their place along the Bermondsey gallery corridor – humanise the nascent technological possibilities of the time, shaping a sense of dimension that we now recognise as the digital sphere. In these works, space unfolds as an infinite expanse, within which fundamental geometric principles are elaborated into illusory spatial configurations that anticipate more advanced visualisation technologies and computer-generated cyberspaces. Dimpled or pixelated cubes and spheres interact with more complex forms such as ribbons, floating chequerboards and tunnelling wormholes.

Suffused with illusory light sources, the gradations of light and shadow within these works reveal a tension between subjective and objective observation, inspiring an illusion of deep space and disoriented perspective. According to Held, the relative spaces depicted in these works reveal ‘multiple truths’, embracing contradiction and paradox as inherent problems in representing volume in painting. Challenging Euclidean principles of geometry, the ‘Luminous Constructs’ emerge as multiversal successors to Piranesi’s semi-illusionistic landscapes. Drawing also from Renaissance art in their use of narrative and perspective, Held expanded the field of the viewer through the compression of volumetric space. On the precipice of 21st-century technological progress, working in parallel to early concepts of virtual reality that have now become ubiquitous, Held’s late works optimistically gesture towards the future.

Al Held was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1928 and died in Todi, Italy in 2005. He exhibited extensively throughout his career including solo exhibitions at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1966); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1968); ICA Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1968); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas (1969); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1974); and ICA Boston, Massachusetts (1978), among other museums. He produced major public artworks in prominent cities around the US including Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Washington, DC; New York; and Orlando, Florida. Held’s work features in many museums and public collections including those of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin and Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland. He taught in the graduate programme of the Yale School of Art from 1963–80.

[1] James Faure Walker, ‘Al Held, Interview’, Artscribe, no. 7, 1977, p. 8
[2] ‘Al Held in conversation with Irving Sandler’, Al Held, White Cube, London, 2021, p.14