Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Al Held
American; 20th-century
New Brunswick, NJ: Zimmerli Art Museum (Exhibition: Crossing Borders: Geometric Abstraction 1960 to Now)
74%
Untitled. 1961. Acrylic on board
One wonders, looking at an unimpeachable picture like this, why Held ever had to get so optical, busy, flat, and precise, which is where his work went during painting's doldrum decades after the sixties. So much of what this artwork has to offer is in how handled and imperfect it is — in how much careless impasto defines its surface and in its slipshod geometry. Look at the way the width of that red band expands and contracts as it slopes slightly downwards from left to right. Look at the little dash of white between the green and the black triangles at bottom left. This dash is especially telling, as it's less an imperfection than a feint of an imperfection: as a compositional device, it implicates not just the white triangle to its right, but even the thin pigmentless strip far away that lies between the blue rectangle and the dark band that brackets it at right near the top of the picture. Though there's a slightness to this painting that stems, I think, from its unwillingness to flirt with pictorial depth, its underhanded cohesiveness plays well against its brazen color and roughness. (TFS, 2025)