Bacon / de Kooning at Lévy Gorvy Dayan: A First Pairing on the Upper East Side

Lévy Gorvy Dayan opens Bacon / de Kooning on November 4 and runs it through December 19, 2026. It is the first exhibition to set Francis Bacon, the standard-bearer of the School of London, directly beside Willem de Kooning, a central figure of the New York School. The show is on the second floor of the gallery's 1932 Beaux-Arts townhouse at 19 East 64th Street.

The selection is limited to smaller paintings from the late 1960s and the 1970s. De Kooning worked mostly at 60 by 55 inches, while Bacon kept to his preferred 14 by 12 inches. Both artists chose these formats for their human proportions. The dimensions let each painter concentrate emotional force and show technical and gestural command, and they ask the viewer for the same close scrutiny.

The two met in New York in 1975, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art held a Bacon retrospective, and a photograph of that encounter is well known. They had met before and knew each other's work. Even so, they have long been placed at opposite poles: Bacon as the champion of a heightened, existential figuration, de Kooning as a pioneer of gestural Abstract Expressionism. The exhibition proposes that both treated paint as a primary means of human expression.

Both came to this question after the Second World War, the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, when many of their contemporaries abandoned the figure. Bacon was openly dismissive of abstraction and called Pollock's work "old lace," yet his own figuration was a controlled distortion that turned the body into bruised flesh. De Kooning reached abstraction through the figure, with flesh turning into landscape under his brush. Bacon conceded that de Kooning was one of the few painters who could make paint work.

In the 1970s de Kooning described a run of paintings made with the sense that he "couldn't miss." Bacon reached a peak around the turn of the decade with small canvases in which a face alone carries the weight of a full figure. His sitters were mainly close friends and lovers, along with himself, and he worked largely from photographs and memory. He often made portraits as diptychs and triptychs. The show includes single panels and triptychs depicting Bacon himself, George Dyer and Henrietta Moraes, among others, with works lent by private collectors.