Al Held

Al Held was a second-generation Abstract Expressionist. He studied at the Art Students League in New York and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. With a distinguished career that spanned nearly five decades, Held was one of the first artists to move beyond the flat color plane of Minimalism to embrace bold color and geometric shapes, creating forms in illusionary space that recalled early Italian Renaissance painting. Over the years, his hard-edged, geometric abstractions grew increasingly more complex in detail and expansive in scale. At times, his paintings were so large that they could not fit into commercial galleries for exhibitions. In addition to being an internationally renowned painter, he was also an influential art professor at Yale University for nearly twenty years.

His work is in collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin.