![]() ![]() ![]() These paintings were both an assault on and acknowledgement of high Modernism’s insistence on the flatness of the picture plane. Even aided by assistants, as he was later in life, Held seemed to manipulate lines and forms with a deceptive dexterity. These are not scaled-up drawings but works that originated in the painting process itself. ![]() The numbers in the titles - like “B/W XX” (not on view, but in the catalogue), “Phoenecia VII,” and “Esopus I” - imply at least 28 paintings. It is startling to realize that Held painted the eight paintings in this show, most measuring over nine feet in height, in just two years. Rather than objects, the paintings behave as fields, where relationships dominate instead of physicality.Īl Held, “B/W XI” (1968), acrylic on canvas, 120 x 138 in (click to enlarge) White spaces become enlarged or compressed as we pass from one end of the canvas to the other, and angles change as we get closer or further away. But up close, at the distance from which they were painted, our physical relationship to these colossi distorts all perception. On a page, on a screen, or even from a good distance, the whole painting can be apprehended, despite its internal contradictions. But the mammoth scale of the work in Black and White Paintingstakes one off guard. Held’s Alphabet Paintings - flat, geometric oils in the form of minimal letters made between 19 that Cheim & Read showed three years ago - were imposing in their monolithic size. The paintings suddenly engulfed viewers with webs of contradictions. Coming to him in the form of the diagonal, as he passed from his late 30s to early 40s, it transformed his work from having the punch of a pugilist to the stealth of a ninja. In 1967, the angel of ambiguity rescued Al Held from the burly heaviness of his body and the formalist ideology of his thinking. Installation view of ‘Al Held: Black and White Paintings’ at Cheim & Read with “B/W XIV” (1968) at center (photo by Brian Buckley for Cheim & Read, New York all images courtesy Cheim & Read) ![]()
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