by Clay Matlin
Allow me to begin with a personal anecdote: When I was in seventh grade in upstate New York in the early 1990s my math class was assigned a project in which we were told to put nails into a piece of plywood, about 10” by 18” in size, and then make some sort of geometric pattern by passing different colored strings around the nails. One of my classmate’s mothers, let’s call him LD, was Al Held’s house-cleaner. Al Held essentially did his project for him. I know this because LD told me the day the projects were due. While the rest of us brought in terrible looking boards with crooked nails and slack strings, LD had, what should in all likelihood be in the Al Held estate, a project so sophisticated that it was a marvel to behold. I was furious. The teacher proudly displayed it on the classroom wall. I never forgave LD. Perhaps indicative of the lasting irrationality of the teenage mind, I even carried a grudge against Al Held into adulthood. When I thought of his paintings I immediately remembered my own terrible string project, which was my first encounter with the artist.
Later on, I tried to familiarize myself with his work and came to know his bright, colorful geometric paintings from the mid-1980s into the 1990s. It was not, nor continues to be, I must confess, the type of abstraction that speaks to me. His floating geometric forms, and later abstract landscapes, remind me more of exercises in perspective and draftsmanship than rigorous painting. They read like a game of object placement: a beautifully painted triangle here, a cylinder there, a plane, a cube in the background—allOf it elegantly rendered, but a bit dull. More math than art.
Yet now I realize that this was an unfair characterization. While I am still lukewarm on his later works, his Alphabet Paintings (1961-1967), recently on view at Cheim & Read, culled from private collections and comprising seven paintings and two drawings, are real masterpieces of abstract painting. As David Rhodes elegantly put it in the Brooklyn Rail, the massiveness of the paintings, often constructed on panels—the smallest measures seven feet by six feet—is a bit of shock to viewers of contemporary abstract painting, whose experiences are bound by such concerns as the limits of studio space. Referencing both geometric shapes and letters of the alphabet, the paintings are gorgeous and, in their own way, tremendously brave. Dore Ashton knew it, and there isn’t much she’s missed in the art world, when she observed in 1964 that he managed to avoid making work that was merely decorative. This is an especially difficult task with abstract painting, not because it is inherently decorative, but because it has the capacity to become decorative or to be made a vessel for decoration. Think of any recent home makeover show. At some point the lead designer will probably buy a blank canvas from an art supply store, apply some paint with a roller, and then proceed to place a random number of garish brushstrokes on it. And voilà, an abstract painting. This “painting” will then be hung in the new bedroom or den and will proudly be referred to as “art.” While potentially aesthetically pleasing, it is just decoration, an object that serves to make the room more attractive by adding some amount of ornament. The “painting,” or “art,” is as banal as a new coat of paint. If successful, it melts into the room, becoming part of the whole.
For Held, though, there is no danger of this happening. The viewer is forced to confront his alphabet paintings, not only because of their size, but because of the rigor of their creation. Held was aware of the lurking seduction of decoration: “every art form has traps,” he said to Ashton. “The trap in my style is decoration. The trap of action painting is verbosity.” He was right, of course. As great as Jackson Pollock was, he can be verbose, especially in his early work which often says too much—the hand simply moved too fast. The later Pollock, say in White Light, (1954) or a little earlier in Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950), is much more controlled, and thereby powerful, than the path-breaking, but nonetheless more talkative and wild Full Fathom Five (1947). For Held, paintings like the enormous Circle and Triangle (1964)—which measures twelve feet by twenty-eight and is comprised of four panels: the two on the left contain a magenta circle with a thinner blue circle around it, the two on the right a black right triangle with the top and bottom left corner missing—betray no ostentatiousness. Instead, and this is a rather difficult thing to accomplish when working on the scale of these paintings (most are twelve feet by nine-and-a-half feet), Held managed to create both real emotional power and calming influence.
The paintings are never gratuitous or verbose, which is in direct contrast to his contemporary Cy Twombly, who like Held was born at the peak and end of American inter-war prosperity: 1928. (Perhaps there is something to that birth date on the cusp of so much profound loss: one went full bore into his paintings and one maintained a measure of reserve). There is no question that Twombly was a great artist—if you doubt this, just spend five minutes in The Fifty Days at Iliam room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Nevertheless, Twombly apparently never encountered, with his calligraphic and cryptic scribbling, a canvas that wasn’t in some way worthy of his masturbatory mysticism and declarations of genius. Take, for example, the thirteen foot high, fifty-three foot long Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) at the Menil Collection’s Cy Twombly Pavilion. It’s magnificent, but the work might also be the height of painterly egomania. Whereas Held always seemed to be finding his way through some perilous middle ground of artistic confrontation rather than engaging with the overly gestural or restrained qualities that seem to characterize so many of his contemporaries. It is this navigation of the middle that makes Held so important.
Much has been made of the “heroic” quality of Held’s paintings. I’m not sure what this means; I assume it’s an allusion to the size. Though the heroic need not only reference how big something is. Richard Tuttle’s very small sculptures are heroic, maybe not in a way that is stereotypically macho or filled with the longings which we attribute to abstract expressionism and its second generation, of which Held was a member. Heroism ought to come in many sizes, and if we are to think of Held as heroic in any way, perhaps that heroism should be found in his desire, and capacity, to negotiate a middle passage. Robert Storr is right in his catalog essay: Held’s paintings are emblematic of a conflict between a painter who wanted to, and eventually did, free himself from the strict modernist ideology of a mid-century Formalism that wanted flat, picture-plane hugging, anti-illusionism.
When Held painted the Alphabet Paintings the high priests of this vision were Michael Fried and Frank Stella. Held’s paintings are a direct struggle with what Storr astutely calls an “ideological mandate.” One can see Held moving against the hard-edge painting of the time (embodied by artists like Kenneth Noland and Ellsworth Kelly), while the related, and generally overlapping, post-painterly abstraction that defined so much of the 1960s (think Frank Stella, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, and Helen Frankenthaler) was too much beholden to the very flatness that Held sought both to confront and escape. There is depth and space to the Alphabet Paintings. They do not just sit on the canvas. Their size is only part of the story. Dore Ashton called Held’s mission an “extravagant dream” in 1964, a dream to “find a fresh way to cope with the implacable flatness of a canvas surface: to invent a unique means of dividing its area so that an authentic experience of forms in space is effected.”
We need dreamers, and we should not forget those like Held who wanted, as Storr correctly understands it, to contemplate the Cubist attack on “Alberti’s model for projecting three dimensions into two.” Held’s thick paint, almost like lacquer, but with a rich, supple quality, rises off the canvas. He achieved in the Alphabet Paintings a three dimensionality that his contemporaries were not interested in. Those enormous block letters are not just part of the picture plane. The relationship between Held and someone like Ellsworth Kelly is one of generation, not of vision. This is no slight to Kelly. Artists need not have the same mission. Held struggled with the confines of the canvas, and that struggle is evident everywhere in these works.
Again, perhaps we should not think of Held’s heroism in terms of the size of his paintings, but in the challenge he posed to the romantic longings of abstract expressionism and the anti-romantic strictures of its second generation. It is a precarious position to navigate the middle ground, it requires a tension and emotional fortitude that is can be difficult to maintain. If we think of a great talent who was destroyed by the pursuit of the middle then we ought to think of Camus. Were his stakes higher than Held’s? Probably. The desire to be a moral voice without being a moralizer, to speak of freedom without betraying your heart, to seek a position so resolutely in the middle that it forces one into silence has something of the tragic. Held had no such weight to bear. There is no deep tragedy in his paintings, no Algerian War. Life does not hang in the balance if one chooses to react against Formalism or not. Silence here is not equated with complicity. Besides, what could complicity entail in the world of painting anyway? There are no art historical emergencies; no life or death struggles—at least not right now. This is not to imply, though, that there are not important questions worth asking, or answers worth trying to find.
Held’s middle ground was important because it shows us that the middle can be traversed. We can pursue an avenue of investigation that is real and purposeful, something that does not succumb to the past or gives into the fashions of the present. Al Held was never fashionable. Yes, he made massive paintings when everyone else did, but his were different. The dream was his own. He should be fashionable. There should be a survey at that old folks home for white men known as MoMA. If Brice Marden can have a massive retrospective before his seventieth birthday then Al Held has been sadly dismissed. Did Marden deserve it? Maybe. There are others, though: some older, some dead, tucked away in MoMA’s seemingly endless racks of modernist paintings, now drifting away into history, often forgotten. Joan Mitchell could stand to have a retrospective. She was probably the greatest of the second generation, potentially even surpassing the accomplishments of the first. Soon the Agnes Martins will be put in storage too. The pattern is familiar. We celebrate those who stayed, forget those who died or left (Mitchell moved to France, Martin to New Mexico, Held split much of his time between Boiceville, NY and Italy) to forge their own way.
To see the Alphabet Paintings is to see Held with fresh eyes. To see a certain type of artistic bravery that is in short supply these days. His paintings are unironic, made with heart and motivated by important aesthetic questions. It is too easy now to be ironic. Real irony should be hard. It should count for something. The stakes must be high. Kierkegaard reminds us that irony is the urge to be a human being once-in-a-while. We must use it sparingly. Al Held’s paintings show us that his humanity was never in doubt. And in the end, this all we can ask from our artists.
