TODI, ITALY.- American painter Al Held, 76, died at his home in Todi, Italy. He was well-known for his large geometric abstractions. Born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, Al Held studied painting at the Art Student’s League in New York City in the late 1940s and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris in the early 1950s. After returning to New York in 1953, he mingled with many of the pioneering artists of the New York School and soon began painting in an Abstract Expressionist style, which was the most heralded format of the day. In the early 1960s, Held was appointed Associate Professor at Yale University, where he continued to teach through 1980. As many of his peers began exploring geometric vocabularies in the early 1960s, Held, too, turned to geometry. By the mid-1960s, he was painting large, flat abstractions, each composed of geometric configurations that overlap a painting’s edges, while dividing a composition into areas that may be read interchangeably as figure or field. Not wanting to become a colorfield painter, however, and recognizing that he had in effect reached the limits of reductivism, he decided to swing the pendulum in the opposite direction—by accepting the validity of illusionistic space. His paintings are included in more than thirty-five museum collections around the world.