Willem de Kooning at MoMA

Seated Woman, circa 1940
Around 1940, not long after he met his future wife Elaine, de Kooning embarked on a series of paintings of women, for which she often served as a model. In these he tried to reconcile elements of modernist painting like flatness, fragmentation and distorted figuration with the suavely contoured line of old master drawing.

• Review: De Kooning at MoMA