Al Held (Brooklyn, 1928 – Camerata, Italy, 2005) was an American painter best known for his large hard-edge canvases, a strand of abstraction that followed the gestural work of Abstract Expressionism. Born into a poor Jewish family in New York, he showed no interest in art until leaving the Navy in 1947. He studied at the Art Students League and, with support from the G.I. Bill, spent two years in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where he gave up realism.
Back in New York in 1953, Held kept the energy of Abstract Expressionism in his early work, but by around 1960 he sought a more ordered alternative: vivid geometric forms, first in oil and later in acrylic. Between 1961 and 1966 he painted huge letters of the alphabet, and in 1967 he turned to black-and-white images whose shapes suggest volume and disorienting perspectives. In the 1980s, after time in Rome, he produced watercolors of deep space that evoke infinity.
He taught at Yale University from the 1960s until 1980. In 2005 he completed a mural for the New York City Subway, and that same year he was found dead in the swimming pool of his villa in Italy, believed to be of natural causes. His legacy lies mainly in championing geometric abstraction against purely gestural painting.