[4] Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1928, he grew up in the East Bronx, the son of a poor Jewish family thrown onto welfare during the depression.

Inspired by his friend Nicholas Krushenick, Held enrolled in the Art Students League of New York.

He originally thought about studying in Mexico under the prominent muralist David Siqueiros, who created gigantic pieces that contained intense political material.

During the early 1950s Avant-garde painters in the United States were receiving fresh inspiration from abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning.

In 1965, the critic Irving Sandler curated the critically acclaimed Concrete Expressionism show at New York University featuring the work of painters Al Held and Knox Martin and the sculptors Ronald Bladen, George Sugarman and David Weinrib.

Feeling that he'd reached the end of his style's potential, he shifted in 1967 to black and white images that dealt with challenging perspectives and "spatial conundrums".

Some critics dismissed this work as simply disorienting; others declared it Held's finest achievement to date.

In 2005, he completed a large, colourful mural in the New York City Subway system, at Lexington Avenue / 51st – 53rd Streets station.

[7][8] At age 76, Held was found dead in his villa swimming pool near Camerata, Italy, on July 27, 2005.

As time went forward in the fifties, Held began to lengthen his gestures and combined strokes into triangles, circles, and rectangles.

[citation needed] The development of this style also led Held to change his medium from oil to a water-based acrylic.

There is a delicate alteration of the letters as Held plays with viewers perception's by changing the figure to the frame.

It leaves the viewer to think about the ideas of space and form and how dimension plays a key role.

[4] A representative black-and-white mural of volumetric forms in space, Rothko's Canvas, was commissioned for The Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, NY.

[16][17] The Pérez Art Museum Miami, holds an example of Held's geometric abstraction series titled Solar Wind I, produced between 1973-74.

Much of Held's modern artwork includes large symmetric non-objective structures with vivid colors.

[21] Describing Held's images as "room" or "walls" makes sense, however, the art is non-objective and those may not be the best words to use.

After the break-up with his wife, he went to San Francisco where he met the soon-to-be postmodern dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer.