Deborah Barlow reflects on the Willem de Kooning Retrospective on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York through January 9, 2012.

Barlow notes that "In many ways this was a show that brought me to far extremes of response, all in the context of acknowledging the enormousness of De Kooning’s influence on the flow of art in my lifetime. He was the primary influence on most of my art teachers in the 1970s, and coming to terms with his work has been a consistent theme in my artmaking life. Some of these works were so breathlessly exquisite I became faint and had to sit down (like the cases of the 'Uffizi effect' reported by James Elkins in his book Pictures and Tears.) But other paintings were frustrating and exacerbating."