22 January 2008

ERASED DEKOONING

In lecture tonight we'll talk about Robert Rauschenburg's Erased DeKooning. Rauschenburg is a Texan, of course. DeKooning was a Dutch master of abstract expressionist painting. In 1959 Rauschenburg was a young punk in NYC. Rauschenburg asked the master DeKooning for a drawing. Rauschenburg took the drawing home, erased the whole drawing, and retitled the piece Erased DeKooning.

In an interview with art critic Calvin Tomkins, Raushcenberg said: "I had been working for some time at erasing, with the idea that I wanted to create a work of art by that method. Not just by deleting certain lines, you understand, but by erasing the whole thing. Using my own work wasn't satisfactory . . . I realized that it had to be something by someone who everybody agreed was great, and the most logical person for that was de Kooning. . . . finally he gave me a drawing, and I took it home. It wasn't easy, by any means. The drawing was done with a hard line, and it was greasy too, so I had to work very hard on it, using every sort of eraser. But in the end it really worked. I liked the result. I felt it was a legitimate work of art, created by the technique of erasing."
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