Bacon / de Kooning
4 November - 19 December 2026
Lévy Gorvy Dayan
19 East 64 Street

Lévy Gorvy Dayan is pleased to announce Bacon / de Kooning, a major non-selling exhibition (all loans from major private collections; many works never publicly exhibited) of the rare pairing of Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) and Francis Bacon (1909-1992) masterworks, staged in consultation with the Willem de Kooning Foundation and the Francis Bacon Estate.

The exhibition will focus on exceptional paintings from the 1960s and 1970s, when both artists were working at the height of their powers. The two artists 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 they possessed painterly affinities, they have long been positioned as painters working at alternate ends of the artistic spectrum—Bacon the master of a heightened and existential figuration, and de Kooning the 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.

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More information is in the above-linked press release, and a preview of works on view is below. See the Dropbox folder linked above to download web-resolution image files. Artwork information is in each image’s file title. Image reuse must be exclusively in association with press coverage of the exhibition. All artworks are to be credited “© 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan,” and installation views should be credited as "Installation view of Bacon / de Kooning, Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York. Photograph by Elisabeth Bernstein.”