Erased de Kooning Drawing  

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Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) is a work by Robert Rauschenberg.

It is an erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning. Rauschenberg obtained the drawing from de Kooning himself for the express purpose of erasing it as an artistic statement.

The statement supposedly being: Willem de Kooning was a symbol of abstract expressionism. Rauschenberg's Pop art was a reaction against it.

Henner created controversy in early 2012 with the publication of Less Américains. In this self-published work, the artist erased 83 photographs from Robert Frank's celebrated photobook, The Americans, leaving only faint remnants of the historic images. In an interview with the New York Times, he describes the erasure of Frank's photobook as an homage to Robert Rauschenberg who similarly created controversy in 1953 with his drawing "Erased De Kooning."

Henner discusses the work in terms of blurring the boundaries of authorship and ownership:

I don’t know if anyone has examined Frank’s images as much as I did ... one of the things that really struck me was playing with shape and texture almost in a way that a painter works. I’m making very active choices about what kind of shape and textures I want to have ... I started to place my images next to Frank’s and sure enough there were things that you simply wouldn’t have notice before. It suddenly takes on a whole new significance.

The Americans is one of documentary photography's most revered works and Henner's book resulted in mixed reviews. The Guardian's Sean O'Hagan described it as "either inspired or provocative-to-the-point-of-insulting to the original" whilst Colin Pantall, writing in the British Journal of Photography, described it as "a Churchillian proclamation that far from being over, photography has barely begun." A review by Jeffrey Ladd in Time Magazine ended by evaluating the work in relation to Jack Kerouac's own words written in the 1958 introduction which accompanied the first US edition of Frank's book:

What poem this is, what poems can be written about this book of pictures some day by some young new writer high by candlelight bending over them describing every grey mysterious detail.


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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Erased de Kooning Drawing" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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