Al Held was an influential American artist appreciated for his monumental Hard-edge paintings. In his best-known works, Held focused on abstract, geometric forms existing in a non-Euclidean space. “The best abstract painting transforms its formal qualities into metaphors for truths unavailable to direct perception,” the artist once explained. Born in Brooklyn, NY on October 12, 1928 to Polish immigrants, he spent two years serving in the US Navy before enrolling in the Art Students League of New York. Travelling to Paris on a GI scholarship, the artist attended the classes of Ossip Zadkine and befriended Ellsworth Kelly and Joan Mitchell. Returning to New York in the 1950s, his Abstract Expressionist compositions of thick, ...