At the Charlie Egan Gallery in the spring of 1948, De Kooning held his first solo exhibition at the age of forty-four. The majority of the paintings on display were Untitled compositions that featured vaguely recognizable shapes and intricate interplays of figure and ground, all painted in black and white. Although the exhibition did not receive much attention from the press, it had a significant impact on the downtown art scene, both on seasoned artists and newcomers. De Kooning's use of stark black and white color scheme, coupled with his manipulation of surface and depth, resulted in a dynamic composition that appeared to be on the verge of disintegration.

While the viewer might discern elements such as a haunch or a penis, the white lines that De Kooning drew on the surface also had a calligraphic quality to them, reminiscent of his time as a sign painter. At the time, the Abstract Expressionists were interested in symbols and ideographs, and how paintings could convey a universal human emotion or experience. Harold Rosenberg, De Kooning's friend, described these paintings as "symbolist abstraction dissociated from their sources in nature[;] organic shapes are carriers of emotional charges in the same category as numbers, mathematical signs, letters of the alphabet; the memory of a friend may be aroused by a pair of gloves or a telephone number, an erotic memory by a curved line or an initial." The shapes and signs in De Kooning's paintings created a mysterious drama that was constantly shifting, necessitating the viewer to constantly adjust and see anew.