The Fabrication of Nothing: The Erased de Kooning Drawing On a cool morning, with a touch of winter in the air, it can make us smile to see evidence of our own breath. It surprises us when we see our own breath made visible. We take air for granted, we don’t have to see it. Some art is like air. Robert Rauschenberg’s white on white paintings and his “Erased de Kooning Drawing” are artworks we don’t need to see to understand. The concept satisfies our minds, well enough to bypass our eyes. The weight of these artworks is not physical, but completely conceptual. Yet, they do exist as objects. Robert Rauschenberg painstakingly erased a Willelm deKooning drawing, producing the infamous “Erased deKooning Drawing”, of 1953. One action obliterated another act, creating while destroying, making while undoing. It was as bold as it was blasphemous. The “Erased de Kooning Drawing” is known mainly to artists and modernists. Amongst this group it is legendary. However, few a...

The Lunch Box Each morning he packed his own lunch: always a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on Wonder bread, an apple (in season) or a banana, one store-bought oatmeal cookie, and a thermos of hot coffee, tepid by the time he drank it. It was not a very good thermos. Ex-cept for the lukewarm coffee, it was the same lunch he had carried to school, as a boy. It was his regular lunch, all his life. As a child the only difference was in beverage, a half pint of chilled chocolate milk purchased each lunch hour in the cafetorium, meaning there was no need for a thermos bottle. A disposable brown paper sack was all he needed to carry his waxpaper wrapped sandwich, fruit, and cookie. His brown bag lunch was like anyone else carried, except in one aspect. All other students chucked their emptied bag into the trash can as the back-to-class bell rang. He kept his brown sack, folding it flat, smoothing it and making a small drawing. When the bell rang he put the dec-orated bag in hi...

The Artwork Displayed Face to the Wall Here’s a category that was probably never even considered by the Guinness Book of Records; “Artworks hung face to the wall.” Thank you very much for allowing me to hold this distinction. The Museum of Modern Art , in New York organized an exhibition of works on handmade paper, in 1976. Kathy Markel called to tell me she was loaning a piece to of mine to the exhibition. I was too busy with the Venturi renovation and addition to the Allen Art Museum, at Oberlin College, to go see the show until toward the end. A friend who often helped me in the studio, Walter Bosstick, was in New York about a month after the exhibition opened and reported back to me the following: “The piece they are showing is beautiful. It’s displayed in between a Jim Dine and a Robert Rauschenberg. But, you know, I thought I knew all your work and this one is very subtle.” I asked him to describe it, since I didn’t know which piece was selected. He did an...