(Zurich 1942–lives and works in Zurich)

Untitled. 1963.

Oil on primed canvas.

Signed and dated on the reverse: Al Held 63.

48.5 x 62 cm.

Provenance:
- Galerie Renée Ziegler, Zurich.
- Purchased from the above in the 1970s, since then privately owned Switzerland.

Al Held, together with Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, was one of the most important Colour Field painters of the United States.

He was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, and at first was not at all interested in art. After dropping out of school in 1945, he served in the US navy for two years. It was only his acquaintance with Nick Krushenick which awakened an interest in art, and he enrolled in drawing and anatomy courses at the Art Students League. From 1950 to 1953 he studied art in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and met Sam Francis. On his return to New York in 1953, Abstract Expressionism with Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning was on everyone’s lips and was to revolutionise art. Al Held found a studio and made the acquaintance of Franz Kline and Mark Rothko; the latter in particular, with his Colour Field Painting, was to have a great influence on Held’s development. In 1956, he was represented for the first time in a group show at the Camino Gallery, and three years later the Poindexter Gallery in New York provided him with his first solo show. The 1960s saw his breakthrough in Europe, where in 1964 he began his collaboration with Galerie Renée Ziegler in Zurich. He participated at documenta in Kassel on various occasions, and numerous museum exhibitions also followed. From 1967 and for several years Held painted exclusively in black and white and excluded any kind of colour from his work, until the beginning of the 1970s. Initially committed to Colour Field painting, gradually contours and forms began to appear, so that his late works would be classified as Hard-Edge painting. From 1962 to 1980 he taught at Yale University. Al Held died in 2005 at his house in Italy.

The present work from 1963 belongs stylistically to Al Held’s Colour Field phase, which is strongly influenced by Rothko and Newman. A bright yellow colour field dominates the picture, which is bordered towards the top by a precise white beam, and terminates below with a soft brown-blue wave. Held skilfully plays with our perception and challenges it, since at first sight our imagination conjures a landscape with mountains and a horizon. Still, if we follow the requirements of Colour Field painting, then we stand close to the picture and sink entirely into a perception of the colour. Without the usual distance when contemplating the picture, the viewer does not have the opportunity of discovering something recognisable, but is entirely exposed to the colour – and the sublime in art. The direct experience of colour is the goal of this work. “The picture becomes the medium for the idea, experienced as sensuous and tangible, as the result of an equally radical and elevated pictorial way of thinking.” (quote from: Walter, Ingo F. (ed.): Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, Teil 1, Malerei, Cologne 2000, p. 289)