As part of his blog series Paintings I Like Paul Corio reflects on the de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and on how seeing the full range of de Kooning's oeuvre illuminates the "real problems" in painting.

"The real problems painting faced after Ab Ex and Color Field were the same problems that painting has faced for about 700 years… Periodically, you have to change the way you do it – you can't go on painting the way that the previous generation painted… DeKooning understood the ideas that were in the air at the time. He chose the ones that were useful to him and rejected the ones he had no use for. He mixed these together with his influences of the the recent and distant past, and most importantly added to the force of an intensely personal vision of how one should paint. I think that the contemporary painter, trying to figure out how to proceed in the impossibly complex art scene of the early twenty-first century, could learn a lot from this approach."