On April 17, the Sixtieth Venice Biennale opened its first preview day. Nearby, Galleria dell’Accademia debuted “Willem de Kooning e l’Italia,” a major exhibition that explores the impact of the artist’s time spent in Italy. To celebrate the exhibition, Artforum revisits “Last Master,” Robert Storr’s text written on the occasion of de Kooning’s passing in 1997. “Combining the craft of the illustrator and sign painter with the trade secrets of the house painter, and bringing them to bear on the problems of studio art, de Kooning replayed the history of painting backwards and forwards,” writes the onetime Venice Biennale curator. “In de Kooning we see the formal synthesis of Cubism and the biomorphism of Surrealism that Picasso anticipated but left incomplete.” —The editors