The digitally enhanced image shows a drawing worked from two orientations, 180 degrees in opposition. Seen in its proper orientation (within Rauschenberg’s frame), four figures emerge: a female nude at the lower right; another nude upside down, top center; a third, smaller figure with arms raised, upside down and just off-center on the sheet; and an upright, abstracted Shmoo-like35 figure toward the right side of the composition. De Kooning sometimes rotated his paper and worked drawings from multiple orientations before settling on one, so some variation in direction and spatial relationships is not unusual. However, the relatively whole figures, the varying scales, and the scattering of forms across this page suggest that we are looking not at a single composition but rather at a page of working sketches—the beginnings of ideas and roughly recorded details, not fully executed thoughts or even finished studies. Moreover, there is no indication of de Kooning’s signature. Ultimately, the exact nature of the drawing that was erased cannot be determined; however, it has little bearing here, because the effect of Erased de Kooning Drawing relies much more on the weight of de Kooning’s reputation than it does on the specifics or relative significance of the original artwork he contributed.36

To speak of the work’s impact we must also consider its reception by critics and other artists. Here, too, the details have often been lost in the shadows of the Erased de Kooning Drawing story. Recent research has revealed that the drawing was shown publicly much earlier than previously known, appearing for the first time at the aforementioned Poindexter Gallery exhibition in 1955, along with Johns’s graphite and lighter-fluid drawing Flag (1955).37 The Poindexter show was held nine years before the Wadsworth Atheneum’s celebrated exhibition Black, White and Grey: Contemporary Painting and Sculpture of early 1964, which has been recorded for decades as the first entry in the work’s exhibition history.38 Having been lost to history for nearly sixty years, the Poindexter show was by no means a major event, and there is no record of anyone (other than Johns) seeing Erased de Kooning Drawing there. Most early viewers likely encountered the work in Rauschenberg’s New York studio, where it hung on the wall, visible to anyone who stopped in on the gregarious artist. The story behind the work was certainly filtering through the city’s art circles in the mid- to late 1950s, as Rauschenberg began telling people that he had erased a de Kooning drawing almost immediately.39 Passed on by word of mouth, the basic plot points of the story had become known among art insiders by 1957, the year Steinberg later reported hearing about the work and being so perplexed that he picked up the phone to call the artist for clarification.40 Recent accounts suggest that many of those who heard about the drawing soon after its completion did not consider it especially shocking.41 To most, it was simply Bob being Bob. The perception of scandal surrounding what Rauschenberg had done developed after the fact: as Erased de Kooning Drawing began to be canonized, it retroactively became more of a collective shock.

Prior to 1964 Erased de Kooning Drawing was nearly invisible within the Rauschenberg literature, with its first mention emerging in a 1960 article by Japanese artist and critic Yoshiaki Tono.42 Offering his observations about American art as a relative outsider, Tono notes, without comment, that Rauschenberg had recently created a work by rubbing out a drawing by de Kooning. Though the reference is brief, Tono singles out the drawing as an example of the most interesting work going on in the United States, suggesting that it is emblematic of a group of artists working with the concept of “crossing-off” without implying negation or resistance.43 A year later, Cage penned an article on Rauschenberg that also fleetingly (and obliquely) mentions the drawing, framing it as a moment of slate-cleaning: “It’s a joy in fact to begin over again. In preparation he erases a De Kooning.”44 Cage’s reference, while barely more extensive than Tono’s, has established an enduring framework for understanding Erased de Kooning Drawing not only as a turning point for Rauschenberg but also as a necessary decalcification of art itself that made possible everything that came after.

Erased de Kooning Drawing essentially remained an underground, art world phenomenon for more than ten years after it was completed.45 Significantly, it was excluded from numerous important solo and group exhibitions in the late 1950s and early 1960s, crucial years when Rauschenberg’s reputation was becoming established internationally.46 The tide turned with the opening of Black, White and Grey in January 1964,47 and momentum built with the work’s breakout appearance in Tomkins’s appealing February 1964 New Yorker profile on the artist. The extent to which Tomkins’s airing of the work and its story has influenced contemporary understandings of Erased de Kooning Drawing cannot be overstated. He set the stage by noting the artist’s outsider status within the “main current of Abstract Expressionist painting” and underscored the seriousness of the endeavor; he then handed the narrative over to Rauschenberg by quoting his first-person account at length. In September of that year, the drawing was used as the opener for a Time magazine feature.48 It was through such publications—and the persistence of the artist’s creation story—that Erased de Kooning Drawing cemented its place in the Rauschenberg canon. Although the work did not garner much attention in reviews of Black, White and Grey,49 it was subsequently included in two nationally circulating exhibitions and traveled to fourteen cities between late 1964 and early 1968.50

The number of published references and the frequency of the work’s inclusion in exhibitions increased dramatically in the following decades. Between 1966 and 1990, Erased de Kooning Drawing appeared at more than thirty-three venues in six countries. The back of its frame is now cluttered with exhibition labels (see fig. 3), a testament to the worldwide demand to see this work of art. The drawing was mentioned in more than fifty-three publications between 1964 and 1976, the year it debuted in Walter Hopps’s major Rauschenberg retrospective. By that time, Erased de Kooning Drawing had achieved its current standing as a defining work in the development of Conceptual art. This position had its beginnings in Allan Kaprow’s 1966 article “Experimental Art,” which posited Erased de Kooning Drawing as the ultimate example of Kaprow’s ideal—a kind of art that identifies conventional boundaries and then finds creative ways to subvert them.51 In 1968, Harold Rosenberg referred to Erased de Kooning Drawing as “the most significant creative gesture of the last two decades,”52 and Lucy Lippard and John Chandler’s seminal article “The Dematerialization of Art” listed it as a prime example of ultra-Conceptualism.53 Indeed, by the time of the Hopps show in 1976, the drawing had come to be seen as a preeminent piece in both Rauschenberg’s body of work and the history of twentieth-century art at large. Rosenberg acknowledged its place as “the cornerstone of a new academy, dedicated to replacing the arbitrary self of the artist with predefined processes and objectives—that is to say, Minimalism and Conceptualism.”54 It was cited in nearly every review of the 1976 Hopps retrospective and has since accumulated a vast history of exhibitions and publications.

As this essay has shown, there is more than one story behind Erased de Kooning Drawing, and trying to place it within a single narrative risks obscuring the complexity of its history and potential. It is too simplistic to characterize the gesture of erasing de Kooning’s work as an act of oedipal insurrection, or an attempt to erase the past to create a new present. Rauschenberg as an artist and as a person was never so unilaterally inclined. It also is an oversimplification to place the work in a straight lineage from Duchamp to Conceptualism. The act Erased de Kooning Drawing embodies was far more complex, and the artwork is far more subtle and far-reaching. Yes, the erasure was an act of destruction, but as a creative gesture it was also an act of reverence or even devotion—to de Kooning, to drawing, to art history, and to the idea of taking a risk and being open to whatever comes as a result. For now, Erased de Kooning Drawing has settled into place as a progenitor of Conceptual art, but its curious beginnings and blank-slate nature ensure that it remains open to future reinterpretations.

Notes