The only documented meeting between Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning took place in 1975 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Now, half a century on, the two giants of postwar painting are about to share a room again: from November 4, Lévy Gorvy Dayan will open "Bacon / de Kooning," a non-selling exhibition assembling rarely exhibited works by both artists.

The show's premise is that the Irish-British master of distorted figuration and the Dutch-born Abstract Expressionist, though worlds apart in style, each found their central creative release in paint itself. Bacon, who died in 1992, built his reputation on haunting portraits and screaming popes that twisted the human body into new emotional shapes. De Kooning, who died in 1997, was a defining figure of the New York School, moving between savage figuration and sweeping abstraction across one of the longest careers in modern art.

The pairing arrives during a busy period for de Kooning scholarship and display. Ongoing exhibitions devoted to the artist are running at the Art Institute of Chicago and Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, and the market has been paying attention too: his 1977 Untitled canvas fetched $12.9 million at Sotheby's earlier this season. By setting Bacon's tense, claustrophobic images alongside de Kooning's gestural canvases, the gallery proposes a conversation between two painters who rarely overlapped in life but shared an obsession with what oil paint can do to a body on canvas.

Because the exhibition is non-selling, it is aimed squarely at institutional attention and connoisseurship rather than the fair-season market. For collectors in New York this autumn, it offers a museum-quality encounter with two artists who continue to anchor the postwar canon.