Robert Rauschenberg was nervous. Standing in front of Willem de Kooning’s house, 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.”
Before he approached the venerated Abstract Expressionist, however, Rauschenberg had experimented with erasure by wiping out his own drawings. But he found it unsatisfactory. “If it was my own work being erased, then the erasing would only be half the process, and I wanted it to be the whole,” he said.
Digitally enhanced infrared scan of Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953, showing traces of the original drawing by Willem de Kooning. Visible light scan by Ben Blackwell, 2010. Infrared scan and processing by Robin D. Myers, 2010. Courtesy of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
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De Kooning was, unsurprisingly, less than enthused at the request. “I remember that the idea of destruction kept coming into the conversation, and I kept trying to show that it wouldn’t be destruction,” said Rauschenberg, “although there was always the chance that if it didn’t work out there would be a terrible waste.” As the younger artist further elucidated his intentions over glasses of whiskey, de Kooning relented.
But the painter wasn’t going to make it easy. As Rauschenberg tells it, de Kooning pulled out a portfolio and began flipping through the contents. Just as he seemed to settle on one, he paused. “No,” the artist mused, “it has to be something I’d miss.” So he pulled out a second folder, finally landing on a sketch made with a combination of grease pencil, ink, charcoal, and graphite.
Later, Rauschenberg couldn’t recall precisely what the drawing looked like. (In 2010, SFMOMA enhanced an infrared scan of the work that revealed several female figures from different angles.) What he did remember was how long the process took: two months, “and even then it wasn’t completely erased,” he said. “I wore out a lot of erasers.”
The result? A blank sheet of paper bearing a few smudges of its former image. It wasn’t until late 1955, when Rauschenberg was scrounging for submissions to a group drawing show, that his friend Jasper Johns suggested he frame the work. Using a duplication machine he had access to through a job designing department store window displays, Johns printed the accompanying inscription:
ERASED de KOONING DRAWING
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG
1953
When it went on view at New York’s Elinor Poindexter Gallery, there was no fanfare. No reviews of the show mentioned Erased de Kooning Drawing. But the story spread through the art world anyway. “You heard of it by word of mouth,” Steinberg recalled.
Detail of Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953, showing the inscription made by Jasper Johns. Courtesy of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Although the work is now often described as Rauschenberg’s most controversial, at the time it wasn’t considered particularly scandalous. Much of his work around this era was questioning the nature of art—a contrarian approach inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s experiments with readymades.
In 1953, for instance, he packed a shallow box with soil, lined it with seeds, and hung it on the wall of a gallery. Rauschenberg returned to the exhibition regularly to water this “grass painting.”
Most notable are his 1951 series of “White Paintings” made at Black Mountain, all-white canvases that appeared to be unpainted. Rauschenberg even asked fellow artist Cy Twombly to paint a few, further questioning the idea of authorship. And he explicitly linked these “White Paintings” to the Erased de Kooning Drawing—both were experiments with what he termed “the monochrome no-image.”
It wasn’t until a celebrated show in 1964 at the Wadsworth Atheneum that the erased drawing became a sensation. Soon, it was a touchstone for every Rauschenberg retrospective. According to Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan in their 2004 biography on the artist, this public display made de Kooning indignant. He believed such an exchange between artists should have remained private.
And certainly, many have classified this as an act of rebellion, an artistic coup d’état. It is often labeled as an oedipal act—a reading bolstered by the fact that, a decade after the work was made, Abstract Expressionism had been overshadowed by Pop.
But Rauschenberg maintained that was never the point of his work. “It’s not a negation,” he said in 1999, “it’s a celebration.”
Digitally enhanced infrared scan of Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953, showing traces of the original drawing by Willem de Kooning. Visible light scan by Ben Blackwell, 2010. Infrared scan and processing by Robin D. Myers, 2010. Courtesy of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
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Vị vua nước Việt lưu đày châu Phi gần 60 năm, sau thành họa sĩ nổi tiếng?
(VTC News) - Đây là vị vua yêu nước của vương triều Nguyễn, được người đời sau kính nể.
Ông chính là vua Hàm Nghi (tên thật Nguyễn Phúc Ưng Lịch) con trai thứ năm của Kiên Thái Vương Nguyễn Phúc Hồng Cai. Từ nhỏ, ông sống trong cảnh bần hàn, dân dã với mẹ chứ không như hai người anh ruột ở trong cung là vua Đồng Khánh và vua Kiến Phúc.
Năm 1884, vua Hàm Nghi được các phụ chính đại thần chủ trương chống Pháp là Nguyễn Văn Tường và Tôn Thất Thuyết đưa lên ngôi lúc 13 tuổi. Sau khi kinh đô Huế thất thủ năm 1885, vua Hàm Nghi được Tôn Thất Thuyết đưa vào rừng núi Tân Sở. Tại đây, vua ban chiếu Cần Vương, kêu gọi sĩ phu và nông dân nổi dậy chống Pháp giành độc lập. Chẳng bao lâu, phong trào kháng chiến chống Pháp bùng lên mạnh mẽ ở khắp mọi nơi trên cả nước.
Chân dung tự họa của vua Hàm Nghi. (Ảnh tư liệu)
Quân Pháp ra sức kêu gọi vua Hàm Nghi đầu hàng nhưng bất thành. Đến năm 1888, Nguyễn Đình Tình và Trương Quang Ngọc phản bội, khiến vua bị bắt. Quân Pháp dùng mọi chiêu thức dụ dỗ, mua chuộc nhưng đều bị ông từ chối. Trước sự bất khuất đó, chúng đành đưa vua Hàm Nghi lên thuyền, đày đến Algeria - một thuộc địa của Pháp ở Bắc Phi.
Kể từ đó, vua Hàm Nghi đã sống ở Algeria suốt 56 năm. Ông trở thành vị vua duy nhất trong lịch sử Việt Nam đi đày ở châu Phi và lấy vợ nơi đây.
Trong thời gian lưu đày ở Algeria, vua Hàm Nghi bắt đầu học tiếng Pháp và được người phiên dịch tên Trần Bình Thanh giới thiệu gặp gỡ họa sĩ Marius Reynaud. Từ đó, ông được hướng dẫn tiếp thu hội họa phương Tây.
Năm 1896, vua Hàm Nghi vẽ bức chân dung tự họa bằng chì than đầu tiên. Bức chân dung được vẽ theo ảnh chụp khi nhà vua mới lưu vong vài năm và trang phục trong ảnh vẫn thuần túy phong cách hoàng gia nhà Nguyễn.
Sau đó, ông đã in sao hàng loạt và tặng bức họa này cho những người ông gặp như tấm thẻ xã giao theo phong tục thời bấy giờ, nhưng mục đích chính là muốn nói: "Tôi vẫn là vua của nước An Nam và người Pháp không thể khuất phục được lòng yêu nước, lòng tự tôn dân tộc của vị vua như tôi".
Những bức tranh của ông khi đó được vẽ dưới cái tên họa sĩ Tử Xuân. Rất ít người biết họa sĩ Tử Xuân từng 3 lần tổ chức triển lãm tại Paris, Pháp.
Năm 1944, vua Hàm Nghi qua đời vì bệnh ung thư dạ dày tại biệt thự Gia Long, Thủ đô Alger. Ngày nay, ở Việt Nam có rất nhiều công trình, đường phố mang tên ông.
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