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Lot Essay
"His steadfast ambition was no less than to find new forms and content for abstraction - which itself was the most important innovation in twentieth century art." (P. Harper, Al Held: American Abstract Expressionist Painter, 1928-2005, exh. cat., J. Johnson Gallery, Florida, 2006).
One of the premier American artists to engage with abstraction in the Post-War period, Al Held painted geometric constructs that pushed illusionistic representation farther than it had ever gone before. The defining characteristic of Held's oeuvre is his exploration of space, achieved by grappling with the fundamental tenets of composition. In B/W XVIII, a complex jumble of shapes unfolds upon closer inspection to reveal incomplete forms and disconnected lines. Inky black lines create tense borders on a field of pristine white, blurring the distinction between interior and exterior, and shapes, which alternately jut out and recede on the canvas, shift as the perspective changes. Projecting out into the surrounding space, these metamorphic forms hold the painting in a constant flux of fluid movement, and recall the strong diagonals of Baroque compositions.
With its limited palette, geometric shapes, multiple viewpoints, and delicate surface tension of push and pull, B/W XVIII invites comparison with Cubism, but Held took his investigations further by including the edges of the canvas and the surrounding space in the work, and by erasing any reference to a real object, similar to the color field painters, a group that included Held's friends Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko. A painter whose legacy has continued to grow since his passing, Held expertly blended materiality and refinement in his paintings, and imbued B/W XVIII with a nuance of meaning which speaks to the complexity of America in the late 1960s.
One of the premier American artists to engage with abstraction in the Post-War period, Al Held painted geometric constructs that pushed illusionistic representation farther than it had ever gone before. The defining characteristic of Held's oeuvre is his exploration of space, achieved by grappling with the fundamental tenets of composition. In B/W XVIII, a complex jumble of shapes unfolds upon closer inspection to reveal incomplete forms and disconnected lines. Inky black lines create tense borders on a field of pristine white, blurring the distinction between interior and exterior, and shapes, which alternately jut out and recede on the canvas, shift as the perspective changes. Projecting out into the surrounding space, these metamorphic forms hold the painting in a constant flux of fluid movement, and recall the strong diagonals of Baroque compositions.
With its limited palette, geometric shapes, multiple viewpoints, and delicate surface tension of push and pull, B/W XVIII invites comparison with Cubism, but Held took his investigations further by including the edges of the canvas and the surrounding space in the work, and by erasing any reference to a real object, similar to the color field painters, a group that included Held's friends Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko. A painter whose legacy has continued to grow since his passing, Held expertly blended materiality and refinement in his paintings, and imbued B/W XVIII with a nuance of meaning which speaks to the complexity of America in the late 1960s.