Al Held began his career as an Abstract Expressionist, but after becoming dissatisfied with this type of painting, he began to exhibit work demonstrating an alternative style. Given the title Post-Painterly Abstraction, or "concrete abstractions," these later works exhibited large, crisp-edged geometric forms with aggressive colors and were met with great acclaim, establishing him as a major figure in the art world. Al Held was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1928, and died in Italy in 2005 at the age of seventy-seven.
Among Held's notable accomplishments are major public artworks in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., New York City, Orlando, and elsewhere. He had solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York). His work is in the collections of scores of museums and public collections. Held taught painting and drawing from 1963 to 1980 at the Yale School of Art.