Al Held

(1928 - 2005)

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Al Held studied painting at the Art Student’s League in New York City in the late 1940s and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris in the early 1950s. After returning to New York in 1953, he became involved with the New York School and soon began painting in the abstract expressionist manner. By the early 1960s, Held began exploring geometric vocabularies and was soon painting large-scale, hard-edged abstractions.