xo

A year ago, I worked in Robert Rauschenberg’s house, on Lafayette St. The door was red. I scanned pictures of his pieces and read letters to his boyhood friends. On the back of a military camp pamphlet, in soft pencil, he wrote that he couldn’t wait leave, to live with him, to start a garden.

In a long digital list, I ordered his first paintings on record, an ugly self-portrait, and an even uglier painting of his daughter. I stopped my ordering at an image of him and his then-wife, half naked and grinning, body pressed against a deep blue cyanotype.

When my eyes hurt, I walked downstairs to the part of his house that used to be a chapel, to spend hours in front of a painting of his that to me looked exactly like having sex in the dark. Night Blooming. He made it during the seven years that he and Jasper Johns lived and worked together, so closely that they made duplicates of the other’s paintings, because they could.

This one was black and had a shiny splatter of silvery white. I was surprised at how much more representative of sex an oil painting can be than a video on Pornhub. There’s a difference between bodies on a screen and the feeling evoked by two men, in the 1950s, on a canvas.

A year ago, I sat across from a very famous art historian (as much as an art historian can be very famous), who was writing an essay about a particular work called Erased De Kooning. It sounds like what it is– that Bob asked William if he could have a drawing of his, to erase. A year ago, this art historian chuckled, pointing out that not a single rip appeared in the thin paper. She said, how tender he’d have to be, to ask for consent, then to gently rub it out.