Robert Rauschenberg Willem de Kooning was nervous. Standing in front ofhouse, clutching a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand, the 27-year-old artist knocked hesitantly on the door. Don’t be home, he silently prayed.

“But he was home,” Rauschenberg later recalled . “And after a few awkward moments, I told him what I had in mind.”

What Rauschenberg wanted was one of de Kooning’s drawings. By itself, the request wasn’t surprising—artists in the same circles often traded works, and the two of them were already friendly after meeting at Black Mountain College a year earlier. But the younger artist didn’t want to hang the sketch on the wall of his studio. No, Rauschenberg explained, he wanted to erase it.

It was a radical request. By 1953, when Rauschenberg arrived on his doorstep, de Kooning was the most celebrated modern artist in New York City. Other artists admired him for his unparalleled draftsmanship; collectors were snapping up his paintings for unprecedented sums. “I recall the frisson, the thrill that went through the New York art world at the news that a de Kooning painting had just sold for $10,000,” wrote American art critic Leo Steinberg in 2000. “More than most of us earned in a year.”

In short, a de Kooning was worth something. Even a throwaway sketch had value, both monetary and art historical—and for Rauschenberg, that was key. “It had to be something by someone who everybody agreed was great,” he explained to Calvin Tomkins for a 1964 New Yorker profile, “and the most logical person for that was de Kooning.”