AL HELD BLACK AND WHITE 1967
March 1 – April 14, 2012
525 West 26th Street New York NY 10001 212.695.0164 www.lorettahoward.com
ROOM FOR MANEUVER ROBERT STORR Given all that has happened to art in the past half century it is hard to remember the time — and for those who did not live it harder still to imagine that there ever was such a time — when the conventional wisdom had it that the ne plus ultra of painting was something called “flatness,” also known as “the integrity of the picture plane.” I choose my words carefully in speaking of these matters since the real issue was not painting’s essence – who now says, indeed who can say, that it has one? — but, rather I am concerned with the set of conventions agreed upon at a particular historical moment by the leading members of the reigning academy, or, if one were to shift to the political parlance of those who have since “deconstructed” that academy and its doctrines, of the hegemonic discourse of mid-20th century American modernism. photo by Andre Emmerich
Untitled, Circa 1967, Graphite on paper 4 x 6 Inches
Al Held was a modernist to the core but he hated words like “hegemonic discourse” and despite his many years on the faculty of the Yale School of Art and the many hours he spent with his peers in cafeterias, bars and studios debating what painting could and could not, should and should not do, he hated academies even more. Specifically, I am referring here to the Formalist school of thought founded by Clement Greenberg and propagated by subaltern critics, curators, and professors. In those dogmatic circles “flatness” and the “integrity of the picture plane” were raised to the level of a cardinal principle, along with a correlative and equally pious aversion to anything that might be construed as a representational illusion. Held’s pictorial rejoinder amounted to a categorical refusal to buckle under to such orthodoxy. Long before Frank Stella penned the 1983 Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard University in which
he challenged the formalist laws he once closely observed — their collective title was “Working Space” — Held addressed the collapsed volumes that Cubism had created out of Renaissance perspective and bequeathed to postwar abstraction as shifting tectonic plates, screens and laminates devoid of diagonal levers capable of pushing them apart and off angle. Rather than argue with history as Stella did, Held set about demonstrating by example how to pry flatness open, facet by facet from the face of the supposedly inviolable canvas inward and from framing from edge to framing edge. This exhibition of drawings and small black and white paintings from 1967 show the spare but decisive beginnings of that process. Moreover they foreshadow the structural rigor of all that was to follow in the not quite four remaining decades of the artist’s long and extraordinarily
productive career, years during which he would conceive and execute gargantuan paintings of Baroque spatial complexity enhanced by a luminous, chiaroscuro palette. The austerity, compactness, and physicality of the work presented here came on the heels of brightly hued, sometimes large format compositions based on the compression and overlapping of bold, two dimensional letter forms, of which one of the biggest and most important examples Mao (1967 in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York,) immediately proceeds the paintings under discussion here. Mao is a benchmark for all that Held had achieved in the gradual consolidation of the hard-contoured but still painterly manner he had developed out of Abstract Expressionism starting in the early 1950s. It is also a measure of all that he was giving up when he embarked on the stripped down approach that produced his first black and white Neo-Cubist images. The rough assertiveness of Held’s boxed shapes suggest a modern Vulcan — David Smith say — bending and twisting spaceframes with hammer and tongs. Except for the fact that all depend for their visual impact on the dominant constraint of the tight square or rectangle within which Held packs them. A good many of these shapes are curved adding tensile strength and graphic flex to the optical equation. Others involve irregularly crystalline composites in which a
transparent bar conflates with a possibly opaque one, or a wedge drives straight into an approximately equilateral block. In a few examples the overall impression is not unlike watching geometric bumper cars in mid-air collision, or the transcendental absolutes of Russian Suprematist solids at a demolition derby. This animated, even antic quality is not allowed to descend into slapstick comedy nor go too far in the direction of futuristic dynamism. Held wasn’t joking, and neither was he trying to depict Utopia in action as more credulous artists had done between the two world wars. Held wasn’t an ideologue. What he was trying to do was to muscle painting back into three dimensions without betraying its character as painting or his own long-standing commitment to the primacy of gesture. He succeeded almost immediately. And he did so powerfully, as these pivotal works attest. Elaborately re-engineered in subsequent reiterations, the initial results seen here supplied the armature for everything that was to come yet hold their own as nuggets of unalloyed pleasure in the magic of pictorial construction. Who could ask for more?
All Works: Horizontal: 1967, Acrylic on paper mounted on canvas 201/2 x 247/8 inches Vertical: 1967, Acrylic on paper mounted on canvas 24 7/8 x 201/2 inches