Requiems for a lost future? Epic scale and forceful geometric forms have long preoccupied Al Held, perhaps nowhere more than in his "Requiem" and "Siena" paintings of the mid-1990s. Reacting to the debut of four of these works in New York, the author ponders the relationship of this "futuristic" esthetic to 19th-century landscape painting

More than half a decade after they were completed, four monumental paintings by Al Held were finally unveiled last year at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens. Held's interest in working on a large scale goes back to 1959 when he began the friezelike "Taxi Cab" series of paintings, some of which are 8 feet high and up to 30 feet long. Held, who divides his time between upstate New York, where the works were made, and Todi, Italy, regularly shows at New York's Robert Miller Gallery, but his giant mid-1990s canvases, which range in size from 15 by 18 to 15 by 30 feet, couldn't fit into Miller's space. Hence the belated P.S. 1 debut.

Among contemporary American painters, only Julian Schnabel and Alex Katz come immediately to mind as having worked regularly at or near these dimensions, but they seem more interested in intimate or anecdotal subject matter. Also, their large work contravenes the traditional use of very big paintings: addressing big themes. Cy Twombly, too, has worked very large and with heroic, mythic narratives, but once again, seems to take an ironical stance toward monumentality by his use of magnified sgraffito and scrawled imagery. Held, on the other hand, does not undermine this scale in any way, but embraces it, with all of its historical baggage.

The centerpiece of the exhibition was in P.S. 1's third-floor gallery, a former gymnasium, where the Requiem triptych hung on three adjoining walls, with another large canvas, Siena IV, on the fourth one. The three Requiems were hung in the same configuration they occupied in Held's upstate studio, where there is a left, a right and a larger central working space. A glowing horizon continues from canvas to canvas and bisects the penumbral atmosphere of all three pictures. Since the central 15-foot-high, 30-foot-wide painting, Requiem H, is the largest of the group, Requiem I and III seem slightly ancillary. These solemn and refined canvases reprise Held's earliest gestural paintings, where deep light penetrates primordial darkness. But here, 50 years into developing his particular synthesized space, an unfamiliar world is created with the tools of perspective and chiaroscuro.

Requiem I is framed by a large, hollow cylinder, placed slightly off-center. Beyond it, rows of volumetric purple boxes above and below the horizon recede toward the bright distance. In the foreground, some floating red ribbonlike forms in a concentric arrangement stealthily enter the center of the picture. They also function as a kind of abstract repoussoir motif that helps lead us into the triptych. Befitting the requiem theme, the pictures are dark. These hues inadvertently make visible the scuffing of the underpainting, which again harks back to Held's earlier work, when he considered under-painting part of the content.

The middle painting, Requiem II, invites the viewer to look onto a vast, geometrically patterned plain from atop an outcropping of geometric solids that include crenellated forms, flat donuts and compressed ziggurats. The presence of an overhanging, stepped form in the upper foreground suggests that the viewpoint might be from a kind of cave. Extending toward the horizon, the wide multicolored landscape features patterns that seem borrowed from the mosaic floors of an Italian Renaissance church. The "sky" is made up of similar patterns painted in brighter colors. All these planes converge on the distant, burning yellow horizon.

Requiem III, which suggests an enormous parking garage with a horizontal slit of light at the far end, is the most architectural in feeling of the three. It also has the most pronounced contrasts in internal scale, thanks to a checkerboard-pattern sphere hovering in the foreground and, back near the horizon, some small slabs and a delicate cylinder.

In contrast to the "Requiem" paintings, the illumination in Siena IV arrives as if during an eclipse, erupting in wedges at the perimeters and upper corners of the painting. Across the shadowy foreground is a wide, reddish-brown ziggurat that masks the light. Its form and scale make you feel as if you were staring at the prow of an aircraft cagier. The exhibition also included five other paintings that explore similar territory at less grand dimensions, and a group of large watercolors (from 3 by 5 feet to 4 by 6) that relate closely to the big paintings without being strictly preparatory.

As the P.S. 1 exhibition closed, a small two-person show at Washburn Gallery in Manhattan examined the early 1960s work of Held and sculptor George Sugarman [see p. 143]. In a pamphlet accompanying the show, essayist Carolyn Lanchner says that Held's aim at the time was to "bridge the gulf that separates the painting from the viewer." Anyone who has stood in front of Held's large works from the 1960s, such as The Big N (1965) in the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art, can attest to their powerful physical presence. The heavily painted white wall of acrylic paint that fills practically the entire picture plane fully activates the space directly in front of the painting, much as in a Sega sculpture or a Stella relief painting.

Throughout the '70s and '80s, Held's paintings kept a degree of muscularity even as they increasingly incorporated perspectival depth and other illusionistic devices. Gradually, he traded graphic punch and material bulk for more spatially complex imagery, deciding, for instance, to sand away the buildup of painting revisions more completely. Black and white dominated his palette in the '70s, but color then returned in a frenzy of candy hues and designer pastels. In his '80s paintings, bedazzlement reigned as baroque geometric figures aligned with tilted and gridded vectors. Then, toward the end of the '80s, a moodier palette of charcoals, mauves and dusky plums altered what had been a chromatic frontal assault and the slowly articulated artificial space became inhabitable, addressing the viewer like a traditional landscape painting.

Stylistically, the high-tech geometry of Held's mid-1990s work anticipates the dominant painting language of a younger generation of abstract painters, who engage or rely on the computer's depiction of painting space. But despite the digital look of Held's recent paintings (which in fact were made without the assistance of a computer), the work is about the past as well as the future. At P.S. 1, it felt unusual, in this space usually devoted to contemporary art, to be gazing so deeply into large, dark paintings--a very 19th-century experience. The canvases coalesced into a quasi-narrative drama and provoked a kind of awe that seemed to transform the gallery into a more formal chamber, like a rotunda. I was reminded of Thomas Cole's paintings "The Voyage of Life" (1842), a famous four-part series that offers a religious allegory of maturation. In it, a figure is depicted traveling through a dramatic landscape in a small boat on the River of Life. In childhood the waters are calm, and a promising landscape comes into view; in youth, the figure sets off to pursue a castle that floats in the sky; in manhood, the rapids approach; in old age, an angel appears in a beam of white light to lead the traveler home.

Like Cole, Held relies on a highly theatrical space: the "Requiem" trio uses dramatic shifts of light and dark, with the horizon line disappearing into a celestial yellow glow that is dominated by an ominous, looming foreground. Painting theory of Cole's era instructed the artist to manipulate the viewer into a state that combined a sense of loss with one of reverence. A similar strategy seems to activate the "Requiems," where the tragic aura present in much postwar abstraction seems to exist alongside the idealist nostalgia of the Hudson River School. (The ambient glow that suffuses both artists' paintings may reflect the impact of Italy: Cole worked in Rome on several occasions, and Held spends much of his time in Tuscany.)

But if Held's "Requiems" convey a sense of nostalgia, just what is the object of this longing? Is it for art's ability to address universal themes? Or could it be that the "Requiems" are lamenting the lost future of abstract painting? I suspect that such questions propel Held's astounding recent work.

"Al Held: Recent Paintings" was on view at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens [Sept. 1-Nov. 10, 2002]. This September, Robert Miller Gallery, New York, will mount a show of Held's new work.

Joe Fyfe is a New York painter and writer.

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