AL HELD
b. 1928, United StatesBorn in Brooklyn, artist Al Held dropped out of high school and joined the Navy at 17, serving from 1945–1947. In 1948 he studied at the Art Students League in New York, and from 1951–1953 invoked the G.I. Bill to attend the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. Held returned to New York at the height of Abstract Expressionism and its related philosophical discourse, in which he took part. However, the genesis of his later work was already forming; as he said at the time: ‘I want to give abstract expressionism structure.’ Characterised by the intellectual rigor with which he approached his work, Held was ultimately a painter of ideas.
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