"Held painted the watercolors at his second home in the Umbrian hills of Italy. Their very titles suggest an intimate, domestic setting. Victoria was Held’s longtime housekeeper, and Primo her cousin who also worked as a gardener. In Italy, Held would “go dreamy,” in the words of his daughter Mara, absorbing the shapes, colors, and vistas and reimagining them in his highly formalized pictorial language. Some watercolors became the starting points for new painting series, while others contain unique imagery unseen in any of his other work. " - Daniel Belasco

A pioneer of hard-edged abstraction, American painter Al Held (1928–2005) created works of great complexity that acknowledged the then-dominant painterly vocabulary of American abstraction at the same time as being profoundly informed by a history of painting rooted in the European Renaissance. During his 50-year career, Held single-mindedly committed to an exploration of the potential for abstraction to reach beyond the realm of the viewer’s primary senses. Continually expanding his painterly language and practice, often in opposition to the dominant ideologies, as the painter and his former student Michael Craig-Martin wrote: ‘His work remained rigorous, and uncompromising, challenging one’s perceptual pre-conceptions and intelligence, rather than conforming to received wisdom or flattering good taste.’