Born in Brooklyn, Al Held dropped out of high school to join the Navy at 16, serving from 1945-1947. In 1948 he studied at the Art Students League in New York, and from 1950-1953 invoked the G.I. Bill to attend the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. Held returned to New York at the height of Abstract Expressionism and its related philosophical discourse, in which he took part. However, the genesis of his later work was already forming; as he said at the time: “I want to give abstract expressionism structure.” Characterized by the intellectual rigour with which he approached his work, Held was ultimately a painter of ideas.

Works

Victoria V
Victoria V
1991

Public Collections

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore