Erased de Kooning Drawing ist ein Kunstwerk, das auf radikale Weise die Definition von Kunst und das Verständnis von Autorschaft herausfordert. Drei amerikanische Künstler waren 1953 an seiner Erschaffung beteiligt: Robert Rauschenberg radierte eine Zeichnung Willem de Koonings aus, der mit einem gewissen Widerwillen sein Einverständnis gegeben hatte. Jasper Johns versah es anlässlich seiner ersten Präsentation mit einem Label, das maßgeblich zu seiner Wahrnehmung als eigenständigem Werk beitrug. Das zu etwas Neuem transformierte Blatt wurde in den 1950er-Jahren als Neo-Dada aufgefasst, in den 1960ern als Beginn der Konzeptkunst und in den 1980er-Jahren als Aufbruch in die Postmoderne. Zahlreiche Künstler*innen bezogen sich auf das Werk und Rauschenberg selbst griff es immer wieder auf. Es erwies sich als Testfall für Bestimmungen von Modernismus, Literalismus und Postmodernismus. Gregor Stemmrichs kenntnisreiche kunsttheoretische Betrachtung arbeitet die anhaltende Relevanz des Werks für die Theorie des Bildes, des Index, der Spur, des Allegorischen und der Frage nach Appropriation heraus.

Includes lectures, essays, diaries and other writings, including "How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)" and "Juilliard Lecture."

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) was a breaker of boundaries and a consummate collaborator. He used silk-screen prints to reflect on American promise and failure, melded sculpture and painting in works called combines, and collaborated with engineers and scientists to challenge our thinking about art. Through collaborations with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and others, Rauschenberg bridged the music, dance, and visual-art worlds, inventing a new art for the last half of the twentieth century. Robert Rauschenberg is a work of collaborative oral biography that tells the story of one of the twentieth century’s great artists through a series of interviews with key figures in his life—family, friends, former lovers, professional associates, studio assistants, and collaborators. The oral historian Sara Sinclair artfully puts the narrators’ reminiscences in conversation, with a focus on the relationship between Rauschenberg’s intense social life and his art. The book opens with a prologue by Rauschenberg’s sister and then shifts to New York City’s 1950s and ’60s art scene, populated by the luminaries of abstract expressionism. It follows Rauschenberg’s eventual move to Florida’s Captiva Island and his trips across the globe, illuminating his inner life and its effect on his and others’ art. The narrators share their views on Rauschenberg’s work, explore the curatorial thinking behind exhibitions of his art, and reflect on the impact of the influx of money into the contemporary art market. Included are artists famous in their own right, such as Laurie Anderson and Brice Marden, as well as art-world insiders and lesser-known figures who were part of Rauschenberg’s inner circle. Beyond considering Rauschenberg as an artist, this book reveals him as a man embedded in a series of art worlds over the course of a long and rich life, demonstrating the complex interaction of business and personal, public and private in the creation of great art.

A retrospective of the artist's work.

This publication offers an unparalleled opportunity to appreciate the development of the artist's work as it unfolded over nearly seven decades, beginning with his early academic works, made in Holland before he moved to the United States in 1926, and concluding with his final, sparely abstract paintings of the late 1980s.

When William Boyd published his biography of New York modern artist Nat Tate, a huge reception of critics and artists arrived for the launch party, hosted by David Bowie, to toast the late artist's life. Little did they know that the painter Nat Tate, a depressive genius who burned almost all his output before his suicide, never existed. The book was a hoax, and the art world had fallen for it. Nat Tate is a work of art unto itself-an investigation of the blurry line between the invented and the authentic, and a thoughtful tour through the spirited and occasionally ludicrous American art scene of the 1950s. William Boyd is the author of nine novels, including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year Award. Praise for Nat Tate: "William Boyd's description of Tate's working procedure is so vivid that it convinces me that the small oil I picked up on Prince Street, New York, in the late '60s must indeed be one of the lost Third Panel Triptychs. The great sadness of this quiet and moving monograph is that the artist's most profound dread-that God will make you an artist but only a mediocre artist-did not in retrospect apply to Nat Tate."-David Bowie "A moving account of an artist too well understood by his time."-Gore Vidal