Erased de Kooning Drawing

How he got the drawing

Robert Rauschenberg had been trying to make a work by taking marks away rather than putting them down. He first rubbed out drawings of his own. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art records his conclusion: for the experiment to mean anything, he had to start from an artwork that was undeniably significant in its own right.

He had already been inside the studio he went to. In early spring 1952 Robert Rauschenberg visited and photographed Willem de Kooning's studio in New York. The museum identifies works in progress in those photographs, among them early states of Woman I, painted between 1950 and 1952, and Woman II of 1952.

In 1953 he went back and asked for a drawing to erase. Willem de Kooning, in the museum's words, somewhat reluctantly agreed. Robert Rauschenberg told the story for the rest of his life, including the detail that he arrived with a bottle of Jack Daniels. In a 1999 interview in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's own galleries he called the finished work one of his icons of eccentricities.

The erasing

The museum calls the erasure laborious and says nothing about how long it took. What the object itself records is more useful. A paper board was mounted to the back of the sheet, which the museum's conservators judge Robert Rauschenberg had likely applied to strengthen the paper before he began rubbing.

The drawing he was given was worked in graphite and charcoal. Neither medium comes off cleanly. Charcoal sits on the surface and lifts readily; graphite bites into the fibre and leaves a shadow that an eraser cannot reach.

That difference is why the sheet is not blank. Everything still visible on it is what the rubbing failed to remove.

Jasper Johns lettered the label

Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns worked out together how the erased sheet should be presented. Jasper Johns lettered the inscription using a lettering device, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art states that the plain gilded frame and the understated inscription are integral parts of the finished artwork.

The museum puts the reason plainly: without the inscription, a viewer would have no idea what is in the frame, and the piece would be indecipherable. The label is what converts a nearly empty sheet into a record of an act.

Robert Rauschenberg later made the point in writing. A studio assistant inscribed the back of the work in heavy black at his instruction, probably just before it toured with the 1976 retrospective: DO NOT REMOVE DRAWING FROM FRAME. FRAME IS PART OF DRAWING.

What is still on the paper

In 2010 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art scanned the sheet in infrared light and digitally enhanced the result, to learn what Willem de Kooning had drawn. The enhancement added weight to the surviving graphite and charcoal until the shadowy forms became visible.

The museum reports what appeared. Several figures fill the sheet, worked from different angles and oriented in two directions. A female figure at the lower left is probably related to the Woman series, which occupied Willem de Kooning from 1950 to 1955.

The museum also enters two cautions. Willem de Kooning used erasers himself as part of his drawing method, so some of the lines the scan recovered may have been erased by him before the sheet ever reached Robert Rauschenberg. And the recovered image is far from a finished drawing or even a focused study; what it shows is an artist in process, thinking with pencil and charcoal.

The museum's own conclusion is that seeing the approximation does not change how the finished work reads.

A second de Kooning on the back

In 1988 a conservator from Cranmer Art Conservation removed the backing board, at Robert Rauschenberg's request. The board had turned acidic and had begun to damage the sheet.

Taking it off uncovered something nobody had catalogued. On the back of the same piece of paper was a faint graphite sketch of a female figure by Willem de Kooning, never erased and hidden for thirty-five years by the board Robert Rauschenberg had glued over it.

The work therefore holds drawing by Willem de Kooning on both sides of one sheet: a rubbed-out one on the front and an intact one on the back.

It did not sell

A registry page from the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York records the work on consignment there for five hundred dollars, from March to October 1958. Robert Rauschenberg's first solo exhibition at the gallery ran from 4 to 29 March that year, and the museum reads the consignment as Leo Castelli keeping the drawing in stock afterwards in the hope the show would sell it.

No buyer came. The work went back to the artist, and he kept it for forty years.

It hung on what he called his muse wall. Fred McDarrah photographed the Front Street studio in January 1961 with Robert Rauschenberg and Gloria McDarrah looking at a block of small works pinned to the wall. Erased de Kooning Drawing is in the top row at the far left, and a Willem de Kooning drawing of about 1947 to 1949 hangs two along from it.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art bought the work in 1998, through a gift from the collector Phyllis C. Wattis, as accession number 98.298.

Where the story came from

The account of how the work was made is not incidental to it. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art states that the narrative is central to understanding the artwork, and that it was first fully published in 1964, eleven years after the erasure. Until then it travelled by word of mouth.

Robert Rauschenberg told it many times over the rest of his life and kept the same key details each time. The museum's reference sheet lists the primary published and unpublished versions, including the one he gave on camera in 1999.

The work also had a hostile early reception in print. Reviewing Black, White and Grey at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1964, Florence Berkman singled it out as the most unusual work in the exhibition, in a notice the museum describes as tepid.

Two artists own what is in the frame

The object carries work by two hands and the marks of a third. Willem de Kooning drew the sheet, Robert Rauschenberg removed most of it, and Jasper Johns lettered the label that says so.

That matters for reproduction as well as for reading. Willem de Kooning died in 1997 and Robert Rauschenberg in 2008, so both artists' contributions remain in copyright, and they are administered separately. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art prints one line on the object record, © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and does not name a second holder.

The graphite sketch on the back is Willem de Kooning's alone. It is the only part of the object he made that nobody rubbed out.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

The framed object is photographed square on against a pale wall, so the whole of it is in view: the gilded frame, the white mat, the cream sheet and the small lettered label below it. Almost nothing is printed on the sheet, which is the point, and the plate is good enough to find what survives.