Bacon / de Kooning

Bacon / de Kooning juxtaposes the works of Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning, two postwar masters, focusing on their smaller-scale paintings from the late 1960s and 1970s. About Lévy Gorvy Dayan is delighted to announce Bacon / de Kooning opening on November 4, 2026, at 19 East 64th Street, New York. Taking place in the gallery's 1932 Beaux-Arts townhouse, the exhibition will juxtapose the works of Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning, two indelible figures of postwar art. The presentation will focus on their smaller-scale paintings of the late 1960s and 1970s—de Kooning at primarily 60 by 55 inches, and Bacon at his preferred 14 by 12 inches—each chosen by the artists for their deliberately human proportions. Through these canvas dimensions, both painters could concentrate their emotive forces and demonstrate their respective technical and gestural virtuosities, reaching a shared essence of figuration and abstraction. Bacon and de Kooning famously encountered each other in 1975 in New York on the occasion of Bacon's retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a face-to-face meeting commemorated by a now iconic photograph. While the two artists met previously, knew of each other's work, and possessed painterly affinities, they have long been positioned as painters staunchly working at alternate ends of the artistic spectrum—Bacon a champion of a heightened and existential figuration and de Kooning a pioneer of gestural Abstract Expressionism. Now, for the first time, Bacon / de Kooning will demonstrate their shared commitment to the medium of paint as a primary means of human expression. Read more Toggle Painting