Al Held's Large-Scale Watercolor Paintings The Construction, Deconstruction, and Reconstruction of Abstraction by Barbara Rose The series of oversize, stretched watercolors that have occupied Al Held since the early Eighties, when he began dividing his time between Italy and the United States, represent a unique and courageous response to the crisis confronting contemporary abstract art. Many artists, and most art schools, now view abstraction as incapable of further evolution. Abstract painting, it is widely presumed, is no longer capable of innovation or of vitally engaging a public whose perceptions are formed by images based upon reproductive technologies. Al Held is determined to prove the reverse: that the future of abstraction is richer and more complex than its past. To understand his unprecedented and monumental interpretation of the intimate, informal medium of watercolor, one needs to review the quirky logic of Held's history and methodology. His background tells a lot about his contradictory character as well as his ability to be the first to sense that a situation is stale and that he should move in a new direction. In the art world at large, Held has always been known as a restless maverick, a Brooklyn-born tough guy who served as a leading participant in every major fray, but always on his own terms. At seventeen, he enlisted in the U.S.Navy. When the War ended, he returned to New York to study art on the GI Bill, first at the Art Students League where he learned to draw the figure. At twenty-two, he already knew there was more to modern painting than what could be learned at the Art Students League. So he sailed for Paris. There he set out to study Cubism under Ossip Zadkine at the legendary Academie de la Grande Chaumière. From the outset Held's work belonged to the mainstream of modern art, yet it still maintained a critical stance toward anything that smacked of formula. His earliest abstract oils in primary colors painted on his return to New York in 1953, the so-called "taxi" paintings in Paris, suggest Mondrian's geometry. However, they are executed in a loose painterly style that would have sent Mondrian running for a ruler and straight edge. This spirit of contradiction remains typical of Held, always the first to jettison a convention when it becomes an academic game with rules, or is worn out or exhausted. Not surprisingly, during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism he started feeling uncomfortable with action painting and took off in a more structured direction, while still maintaining the mural scale, indeed even enlarging the size of the "big picture" for which the New York School was famous. With an uncanny way of making up his own definitions of accepted terminologies such as abstraction, concrete art, pictorialism, imagery, etc., Held has consistently refused to embrace any theory, preferring empirical trial and error. Despite his capacity for analyzing and articulating ideas, from which generations of his students at Yale benefited, once he has defined the problem, he himself is impelled—some would say masochistically—to searching for alternatives to other ways of looking at things. Constantly dissatisfied, he feels compelled by self-criticism to experiment, pushing on toward new frontiers of ways of seeing and picturing. In this sense, he belongs to the searchers like Cézanne, not the finders like Picasso. Thus, both Clement Greenberg's demand for flatness as well as the ultimate modernist reduction, or minimal art's answer of pushing forward literally out in front of the plane, seemed to Held simplistic responses to anti-illusionism, the sine qua non of advanced art in the mid-Sixties. Ironically, Held himself had been among the first in the late Fifties to paint declaratively empty and radically flat paintings. In his "hard edge" murals, which stretched and bent the letters of the alphabet across huge rectangular expanses, he offered an equally physical alternative to action painting. His approach to image was indexical: he painted that specific letter "O" in that irregular size and in that nameable color, across that specific space. His circle was no generic Platonic ideal, but a specific letter of the alphabet. Already in these "hard edge" paintings of the late Fifties, he set forth as his task the construction of a believable physical world that was simultaneously and demonstrably unreal yet visually acceptable as a specific place and space in reality that corresponded to nothing other than itself. By the mid Sixties, Held was getting itchy again. He became critical of the capacity of one flat shape laid on top of another to obliterate what was underneath and to obviate any reading of space behind the plane. The mid Sixties was a critical juncture for the issue of pictorial illusionism. Significantly, the 1966 Caravaggio retrospective, widely discussed in the serious art world, was among the reasons for a wholesale rethinking of the underlying assumptions of abstract art, especially those of flatness and frontality inherited from late Cubism. Perhaps it is no coincidence that a number of artists, including Held's former studio mate Alfred Leslie, gave up on abstract art as too weak to stand up to Caravaggio's bold illusionistic projections into the viewers' space. Except for the color-field painters championed by Greenberg who seemed not to have noticed that flatness was a dead issue, the debate focused on the issue of illusionism. First Frank Stella in his shaped canvases, and then Donald Judd in his historic manifesto of literalist anti-illusionism, "Specific Objects", rejected any illusion of recession behind the picture plane as a relic of representational art. (Later, however, as a result of his own encounter with the old masters in Italy, Stella began to incorporate a complex form of depicted illusionism with literal projections.) Typically, Held took a strong antagonistic stand against both literalism and flatness. Instead, he set about redefining in fresh terms the concept of illusionism in painting, which all modernist theoreticians--and Clement Greenberg in particular—deemed heresy. In answer to reductiveness, he turned flatness inside out and favored maximization of optical input. Introducing illusionism for its own sake was not his original intention, but he felt the need to revamp the language of abstraction one step at a time. Perspective, whose rejection signals the beginning of modernism, was a logical point of departure. He began to think of perspective as another form of push-pull, the balancing of contradictory elements so that ultimately the picture plane is reasserted as a coherent surface. Held's feeling that the issues of abstraction had to be redefined date back to his reintroduction of perspective and line—both banished by the strictest canons of modernism—beginning in his black and white paintings of 1967. These paintings are significant because they acknowledge simultaneously Held's disenchantment with utopian socialism and his realization that non-objective art no longer had its raison d'être as a metaphor for the ideal state. If it were to continue to live, non-objective art required a new metaphorical basis. At the time, however, American knowledge of Russian Constructivism was inchoate because of the Soviet suppression of its own revolutionary avant-garde. Reintroducing perspective, Held was off on his own again, not interested in making the rules or breaking the rules, just averse to rules in general. The black and white paintings eliminated color entirely, introducing a conception of space in which the inevitable illusionism of perspective is reconciled with modernist space by means of carefully calibrated contradictions, which ultimately cancel each other out to negate any reading of fictive space behind the plane. These black and white paintings, which dizzyingly interchange figure ground and solid void relationships, ultimately developed into immense horizontal canvas friezes. The largest was ninety feet long, nearly the size of a football field—perhaps an unconscious pun on Held's athletic definition of field painting. Public art commissions were certainly a factor in making such huge monumental paintings, but Held was interested in large scale for other reasons; for example, the physical involvement and the fact that the viewer was unable to move far enough away from them to reduce them to graspable entities. Held originally thought he would spend a year or so working out problems in perspective. "Then," he recalls, "I realized I had to break down other taboos, so I abandoned color so I could work out the problems of perspective illusionism. That lasted twelve years." The black-and-white paintings became increasingly complex with interlocking and spinning transparent volumes set at angles to each other. The late 1977 paintings are largely square. They eliminate figure ground in using drawing not to block out shape but to suggest hollow volumes. Léger's conception of modeling is remembered but frontality is challenged, scale is created by inflecting interpenetrating transparent volumes with thicker and thinner bent and curved lines, dots, triangles and squares. Held first began to introduce color about 1978 not in order to create field paintings. "Reductivist abstraction was getting too close to color field painting, " Held observes. "I was always interested in the image not the field, so it was inevitable I had to return to image." Held's use of the term image is not to be confused with the conventions of representation. His concept of image rather is that of modeled and tactile volumes and structures that suggest but never complete a sense of three-dimensionality. Creating images rather than fields, however, significantly is tied to the idea of picturing, which color field painting, especially in its current monochrome phase, entirely opposes by concentrating all pictorial value on surface alone and rejecting haptic response in favor of the exclusively optical. Held's reasons for reintroducing color were practical rather than aesthetic. His method, once again, was empirical, not theoretical. He had read Albers, Chevreul, and Goethe on color theory, but he had never seriously studied the invariable and programmed interaction of warm and cool colors on which color theory is based. Nor did color have emotional connotations for him; as far as he was concerned, it was just another plastic element, a tool to create illusionistic space. He was well on his way to a new conception of abstract art when he arrived in Rome to spend the spring of 1981 as a Fellow at the American Academy. Irving Sandler has documented the impact that Baroque architecture had on Held in his 1984 monograph. Italian Renaissance frescoes were also beginning to seem highly suggestive to him. Attracted by their color and surface, he began experimenting during his second week of residency at the Academy with watercolors based on perspective drawings. His initial impulse in painting watercolors was to find a medium that would not be so labor intensive, and moreover one that would permit him to produce more direct and intimate works; in his words, "Wouldn't allow me to cover over and over." Now, in his latest works he layers watercolors as if they were tempera experiments, the thinned coats for purposes of translucency. While he had become frustrated with the labor-intensive process of painting the huge canvases, the watercolors eventually required as much time and effort. Once again, Held indulges himself in a perverse denial of the intrinsic properties of a medium, in this case using the characteristics of watercolor-spontaneity, fluidity and absorbency—against themselves. New York in the Eighties seemed myopic in its vision and Held reacted by going to Rome. Then in 1984, while visiting friends in Umbria, he decided to buy and restore an ancient farmhouse to use as a studio. Since then, he has spent half the year in the woods in upstate New York and the other half the year in the farming country of the hills of central Italy. It is here that he prepares and paints the watercolors in a studio that has reproductions of the Sistine Chapel on its walls and vistas of an agricultural landscape that has been cultivated for thousands of years, which could not be more of a contrast with the wild American woods. Beginning with the large-scale watercolors, which are pulled tautly over and around wooden stretchers, thus substituting for canvas, once again Held goes against the grain in a series of dramatic, no-holds-barred contradictions of the literal flatness implicit in post-war geometric abstraction. His ability to transcend the original motivations that inspired post-war artists to search for ideal platonic solutions that were both utopian and generic was based on a profound knowledge of art history as well as of the unspoken underlying aspirations of Constructivism. The watercolor medium made a colorist out of Held despite himself. It also satisfied his growing urge to introduce radiant light emanating from within the picture. As formalism unraveled, the idea that space, color, light, and modeling could be simply tools for making any kind of painting if the pictorial space is convincingly defined as nonobjective and abstract seemed logical to him. The complex and contradictory images of the most recent series of watercolors with the generic title Paradox have on occasion inspired image paintings on a small scale. These canvases then are radically revised, sometimes evolving into maquettes for the large acrylic on canvas paintings where color once again becomes opaque. In watercolor, however, transparency must be maintained because it is an ethereal medium, both transparent and elusive, defined by its spontaneity and fluidity, by its difficulty to control, as well as by its absorbency into the page. Beginning with the watercolors, Held has focused on light with the same determination that he focused on redefining space. And with reason, since space and light are the two elements in painting that are entirely created by the artist, and thus are those properties, rather than flatness, that are intrinsic to the medium. In Held's recent large-scale acrylic paintings, the light coming from within that is implicit in the watercolor technique of transparent pigment on white paper color is broken into infinitesimal fragments that seem to refract light. Colored bits and chips, angled and fragmented into rounded arcs, give a sense of volume, which is manifestly illusory because shapes and volumes are involuted and convoluted, shattered and broken, so as to be deliberately inconsistent. Held's current work constitutes a coherent and continuing critique of non-objectivity, aimed not at abandoning abstraction but at giving it new life and definition. To accomplish this, he exploits the pictorial means associated with representation, but separates them from their traditional role in depiction. This act, too, may be considered perverse, but it is typical of Held's sense of contradiction. By employing the geometric forms of non-objectivity without their utopian, idealist baggage, he critiques the pursuit of purity to undermine the foundation of non-objective art. He accuses modernism of banishing illusionism, light, modeling, as well as the imagery and spectacle that made painting exciting for centuries. "The founding fathers of abstraction—Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian—threw out the baby with the bathwater. In radicalizing the language of art, they threw out strategies and tools that made painting rich. Instead of reinventing them in a modern way they rejected them whole cloth," he observes. Held likens the problem of abstract art today to that of jazz, which became a specialist's form, once bebop ceased to be dance music. "Art," he says, "has to communicate directly, feeding the eye with the opulent pictorialism that made the old masters rich and appealing. The idea that linear perspective or light or modeling are married to representation is false." Held proposes instead conflicting points of view from which images are seen in space. The result is opposite of the Cubist inversion of three-dimensional space and dissection of the subject into a series of planes parallel with the picture plane, which is the classical pictorial construction. Held twists and bends images which spin and whirl in a colored continuum sometimes with both exterior and interior volumes visible. The invention of the mobile motion picture camera comes to mind as an inspiration for such a 360º degree spatial construction, but certainly the feedback from the various projectiles we have launched into space to observe the universe and their strange findings are more to the point. In no way sketches, the watercolors are finished works and very much ends in themselves. However, the Italian watercolors provided Held with the means to reinterpret the key elements in pictorial art-light, space, color, modeling and image. Eventually Held was able to translate what he learned in the water-based medium, its transparency and absorbency of color, to renew the energy of pictorial art into the huge mural size paintings on canvas executed in his studio in upper New York State during the half the year he spends in America. Held has always had a unique conception of surface entirely at odds with the soft absorbency on which color field painting is based, and which for the most part makes much color field painting look like blown-up watercolors. He is famous for loading his surfaces with repainted corrections and endless pentimenti, which he then perversely sands down to total anonymity and uniformity so that the hand of the artist is never visible. Originally he was thinking of the palette of Renaissance frescos, not of the matte finish of tempera. However, he made a few experiments of painting in tempera on panel that convinced him light could be trapped between layers of diluted water-based pigment. Watercolor is intrinsically transparent, and it cannot become opaque. All the same, Held has begun to use very thin coats of paint, like tempera glazes, to trip light. It seems once again typically perverse to use the fluid properties of a medium like watercolor against itself and to render a medium's fluidity static. Yet scientists have recently discovered that it is possible to trap light, to block its flow. The watercolors and paintings he has produced since rooting himself in the land of the Renaissance in the mid Eighties are a bold affirmation and belief in the continuing power of abstract art to create a coherent image of the world, even when it appears to be falling apart, morally, culturally, politically, and economically. The project of constructing a pictorial space that is not only visually convincing, but also a meaningful metaphor for the contemporary human condition, as rife as it is with contradiction and paradox, is a monumental endeavor in itself. The world of chaos theory demands multiple hypotheses and infinite complexity. The way the artist pictures the world parallels changes in perception. In his reconsideration of the components of abstract painting, light, space, color and volume that models images without suggesting they are solid bodies, Held breaks up shapes into infinitesimal subdivdivisions of color that remind some of the pixels, fractals and bytes of computer imagery. The discovery that light does not move but can be trapped and stopped in time is a recent discovery in science that Held has been working on in painting before it caught the imagination of scientists. Light coming from within is the hardest illusion to master, and it is the current problem for which the white page of watercolor already provides part of the solution. Held is often misunderstood because the public expects logic in a geometric painter. Starting with automatic drawings, he invents a whole world whose rules he makes up, much as the physicist hypothesizes the universe without actually being able to produce tangible evidence of his conceptual construct. He forces the eye to focus and refocus in a series of optical gymnastics following the tracks of projectiles hurling through space at the speed, literally, of light. Never illustrations but imaginatively created constructions, Held's recent paintings nevertheless are clearly related to the changing concepts of the universe that scientific discoveries in astrophysics are yielding, in the same way that that neo-Impression had to discoveries in optics in the late nineteenth century. His möbius strip like images have a physical reality: they thrust forward toward the viewer, seen from multiple foci, expanding pictorial space as a metaphor perhaps of an expanding universe. When Pollock said he was in his paintings, he eliminated the horizon line and created images that appeared to project forcefully into the spectator's space. They had the physical immediacy that Held is determined to achieve. A photograph cannot engage the body physically and kinetically the way a painting can. Held's reconstruction of a physical space demands an imaginative bodily projection into its imaginary architecture where imagined worlds unfold, and scrolling banner roads disappearing into infinity are invitations to a voyage as suggestive as Baudelaire's invitation to the magic isle of Cythera. But on this trip, we will not find luxe calme et volupte, but the challenge of chaos that is frightening to confront. In his ability to contemplate and to picture potentially colliding and paradoxical structures and spaces, Held suggests that chaos may be controlled through rationality. He demonstrates his belief that the enlarged perspectives of the human mind, unafraid to contemplate the unknown, will find a new and strange equilibrium. This is an exhilaratingly optimistic message in an age of fearful uncertainty. For Al Held, painting has to reincorporate what made painting vital and creative, not by copying old masters but as examples of richness of language in the twenty-first century. Viewers suspect Held derives ideas from computer imagery, but the fact is the work evolves in an entirely intuitive fashion out of the artist's own capacity for extrapolating spatial fantasies. Held's method remains that of Cézanne: revision, consideration, correction and further revision and refining until the whole is brought into balance. When we are speaking of what is essentially a Wagnerian cosmic vision, this degree of complexity becomes overwhelming. The wish to give the public something more to enjoy becomes a spectacle that is not a sensation but a great opera or feast in the sense of the public displays of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. "But," he muses," if a seventeenth-or eighteenth-century painter saw my work, they wouldn't know what to make of it, even though I use some of the same tools that they do to make pictures. They would not recognize what I do as perspective." His buckled bridges, tunnels, underpasses, and architectural fantasies take us through an amazing world of artifice and imagination. They are a creative reconstruction of everything that went into painting that modernism jettisoned. As Gorky could picture the inner space of the body with incredible poignancy, Held seeks to interpret Pollock's cosmic explosion with the structural discipline but not the orthodoxy of Mondrian. No one thought it curious that the grid of Manhattan should change Mondrian's way of conceiving space, so why should the images that science now bombards us with not alter the vision of the fine artist. Indeed, it is probable that the photographs of microscopic and macroscopic images regularly being reproduced by Life magazine affected Pollock. For Held, it has not been the sidewalks of New York, but the stratospheric trajectories of bodies in space as we observe them nightly on television or see them reproduced everywhere. "Some people think the country has influenced the work. If this is true, it certainly is not conscious . . . I love the landscape, the switches in spaces and patterns of fields, green coming up after rains. But I am hardly a landscape painter. What I admire in Umbria is the construction of the land: there is not a natural inch. It is all man made and manipulated. That is culture." We can imagine Al Held as Seurat with a Hubble telescope, or as Cézanne trying to bring into equilibrium, through an endless series of corrections and readjustments, the balance of strokes of color that make up his forms. But what would Cézanne think of these space age transformations of his cylinders, spheres and cones? In his Umbrian studio, working uninterruptedly at refining the watercolors and bringing the contradictory and paradoxical images and spaces he creates into an intelligible equilibrium, Held is as alone as Cézanne had been at Aix; his few visitors admiring younger artists who hang on his every word, dazzled by his ability to picture worlds colliding, meteors crashing, universes expanding, black holes opening into other galaxies. Careening, overlapping and spinning at an incalculable speed momentarily arrested to be pictured, Held's cosmos portends the vortex of the gyre that W.B. Yeats prophesied in his great poem The Second Coming. In that sense, it has the terribilità that is the sign of visionary art. Held's ability makes this image tangible and concrete so that without his hand shaking he reminds us of Leonardo's courage in confronting and transfixing the deluge.