Before and after immigrating to the United States in 1926, the young de Kooning supported himself by painting signs, designing window displays, and drawing cartoons. He remained interested in these kinds of commercial art forms even into the 1940s, when he was living in New York. His observation that the distorted, schematic appearance of male figures in a series of drawings begun at this time was inspired by the sight of men standing in the subway "like manikins" seems equally fitting to this drawing. In Untitled, the stiff, empty-headed male figure is matched by the woman, whose head is being manipulated by a pair of arms coming from behind her. However, her fractured, more expressively rendered figure leads to speculation that this pairing of motifs may have personal significance in terms of de Kooning's conflicted attitude toward women. Certainly, the handling of the female form in this drawing presaged his depictions of women in the paintings that were later to earn him the reputation as one of the masters of Abstract Expressionism.