Al Held, 76; Artist, Known for Enormous, Robust Paintings, Taught Art at Yale for 20 Years

Al Held, an artist known for abstract paintings of robust simplicity and enormous scale, died Tuesday at his home in Umbria, Italy. He was 76.

His body was found in the swimming pool at his home in Todi, a town in Umbria. The cause of his death was not yet known, according to Louise Eliasof, a longtime friend who spoke with The Times on Thursday.

For many years, Held divided his time between Boiceville, N.Y., and Todi.

He was best known for a series of mural-size black-and-white paintings that he began in the late 1960s. At the time, his style was loosely compared with that of artists Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland, but Held “was on his own path,” said Andre Emmerich, his New York art dealer through the mid-1980s.

“He was a hard-edged painter,” Emmerich said Thursday. “There was a tremendous play of mass and volume in his paintings.”

Although the high-tech geometry of his later works suggested computer-generated shapes, Held worked freehand on canvases that extended 30 feet or more. After an early period when he worked in black and white, he moved into warm, clear color.

Critics noted his “floating volumes,” his “muscular gestures” and the suggestion of dream landscapes that reoccurred in his compositions. Orderliness and logic were apparent.

“My work is a metaphor for a lot of things, including the state of affairs for all of us today,” Held said in a 2001 interview with the Dallas Morning News. “We’re not going to get rid of chaos and complexity. They’re not going to go away. But we can find a way to live with them.”

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., he graduated from a New York City public high school and studied at the Art Students League in Manhattan for two years before serving in the Navy. He then spent two years studying art in Paris at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere.

Returning to New York City in 1953, he helped to found the Brata Gallery, known primarily for Abstract Expressionist paintings. He worked at the same large scale as the abstract expressionists, but he moved steadily toward the geometric forms that set his work apart.

“He was unafraid of change and pursued with great vigor monumental projects,” said Betsy Wittenborn Miller, a friend and the director of the Robert Miller Gallery in New York City, which represented his paintings.

Held became a professor of art at Yale University in 1960 and remained on the faculty until 1980. Starting early in the ‘60s, his work was exhibited at major museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York City.

His paintings are part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., among others.

In recent years, Held completed a number of public art projects, including a mural for the New York City subway station at Lexington Avenue and 51st Street and another for a public library in Jacksonville, Fla.

He was married several times. His survivors include a daughter and a grandchild.