Who Arted: Weekly Art History for All Ages31 Dec 2025

The Erased Masterpiece - Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning

This episode is kicking off Arts Madness season. Every spring, listeners vote for their favorites in a bracketed tournament of 64 different artists. All during January and February, I will be posting daily episodes as a refresher on the artists and artworks in this year's tournament. Most of these will be encore presentations of old fan favorites, but there will still be new episodes coming into the feed as well. I am creating new episodes based on fan requests which will be coming out on Mondays. Today, I am starting things off with one of my favorites, Robert Rauschenber's Erased de Kooning. A young, up-and-coming Robert Rauschenberg knocked on the door of Willem de Kooning, one of the biggest stars of the art world in his day. Rauschenberg had a big ask. He didn't want advice or help in the traditional sense. He wanted de Kooning to give him a drawing so he could erase it. After an uncomfortable conversation, de Kooning agreed. He looked through his portfolios and picked out a drawing. It was not easy. Rauschenberg spent weeks and wore through numerous erasers on the mixed media piece. In the end he obliterated nearly every trace of de Kooning's drawing in an act that some consider to be an iconoclastic destruction of the artist's legacy and others see as an incredible tribute that completely upended the way we encounter the work moving it from the paper to the imagination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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