Willem de Kooning at MoMA

Pink Angels, circa 1945
One of de Kooning's first great paintings, this picture synthesizes lessons from Matisse, Picasso, Miro and de Kooning's close friend Arshile Gorky — plus a few borrowed images, like the fish head at bottom left, from a 16th century print by Pieter Brueghel the Elder — and makes them into something entirely original. De Kooning never accepted the idea of a firm distinction between abstract and figurative, and here his bulbous pink forms suggest the human figure without ever quite assuming its shape.

• Review: De Kooning at MoMA