Download PDF Version Revolt Magazine, Volume 1 Issue No.4

THE
GALLERY
VIEW
BY ROB REED
AL HELD
Alphabet Paintings
Fedruary 28 - April 20, 2013
Cheim & Read
547 West 25th Street NY, NY
Tension and play were a couple of Al Held's guiding
forces in creating the Alphabet Paintings that Cheim
& Read in Chelsea presents. All made between
1961 and 1967, the monumentally scaled acrylics
on canvas take their queue from letter forms – a
technique for composing and dividing abstracted
space that retains also a sense of visual familiarity
that would otherwise be lost in purely minimalist
works. Typography, here, offers the artist a heuristic
that yields surprising results without ever slipping
into alienating territory.
Held used both serif and sans-serif typefaces,
and in works with letters as titles, he isn't merely
transposing and cropping letter forms. In "The 'I,'" for
example, the white vertical bars flanking the sides
are indeed the spaces created between the capital
letter's top and bottom serif. The white bars are
not true to form, however; they're shortened, and
angled slightly more than 90 degrees, which builds
compositional tension and holds the shapes in.
Thus, the black and white work is strikingly modern
without feeling cold.
Turning to letters themselves, consider that the
quintessentially modern typeface Helvetica – it's
now used by Apple, American Apparel, and even the
MTA subway system – was designed just four years
prior to the earliest painting in this exhibition, "Ivan
the Terrible," 1961. Modern is synonymous with
stripping forms of ornament, and with ornament
goes sentiment. But for all of Held's paring down,
he packs emotion back in with intense color,
compositional skewing, and, at least in the "X"
paintings, thwarting of linear perspective.
In the back exhibition room is "The Yellow X," 1965.
The second largest piece in the exhibition, its content
is true to its title. The power of the yellow hue is
nearly overwhelming as it bounces off the adjacent
walls and fills the room. Lost in some reproductions,
however, is not only the work's scale, but the center
divide where the diptych merges and creates a black
sliver that slices the X rather dramatically.
The Alphabet Paintings prefigure the "abstract
illusionism" developed in Held's later works by
tweaking recognizable shapes. Without all the
overlaps, three-dimensionality, and spatial depth
that dominate the latter-day paintings we more
closely associate with Held, these works have an
eccentric iconicity all their own.
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
February 7 - April 6, 2013
Gagosian Gallery
555 West 24th Street NY, NY
It's nearly impossible to respond to the paintings
of Jean-Michel Basquiat unencumbered by what
history has made of him, or even, for that matter,
what he made of himself. Yet the voracity of the
artist's ego and that of the 1980s art market is
essential to appreciating how the artist worked and,
frankly, how much art he was able to make – roughly
1000 paintings and 2000 drawings in the seven
years before his death of a drug overdose at the
age of 27. (Without a stream of collectors, where do
3000 pieces of art go?) This inseparability of man
and market can translate to an irreducibility that
makes either severe criticism of his work or effusive
eulogizing a bit inadequate.
Gagosian Gallery's Chelsea location offers a unique
opportunity to mine Basquiat's oeuvre through over
50 works drawn from private and public collections.
A curatorial theme isn't obvious if it's here. The
exhibition rooms' large sizes, however, create ample
space for incongruities to commingle without much
fuss. And incongruities, disparities, and stream-ofconsciousness
pastiche are what make Basquiat's
art what it is.
Among the metaphors Basquiat assumed for his
persona is the boxer. We've all seen the black
and white posters of Basquiat and Andy Warhol in
boxing gloves, as if ready to spar. The boxer asserts
Basquiat's aggressive rounds with the art world,
and perhaps – at least in the portrait series of
black boxers, including Jack Johnson, Sugar Ray
Robinson, Cassius Clay, etc. – a critique of the art
world's racial makeup (though this he denied).
Al Held (1928 - 2005), IVAN THE TERRIBLE, 1961. Acrylic on canvas 144 x 114 inches 365.8 x 289.6 centimeters CR# He.31324
Photos courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.
REVOLT
The "boxer series" contains some of the most
inventive works, essentially bricolage, seductively
Magazine Number 4, 2013 6