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-- let’s elude to the new exhibition at Francis Naumann Fine Art on East 80th Street, where Mike Bidlo has installed 16 erased Willem de Kooning drawings of women, all of his own making -- the drawings and the erasures -- framed and matted, with a black-and-white photograph of the now-obliterated drawing taped to the back, and mounds of eraser shavings, or "ashes," displayed nearby under glass domes. Purchasers of each drawing get some residue of the destruction in a glassine envelope. The drawings are priced at $10,000 to $22,000.
Is Rauschenberg’s original avant-garde gesture, so shocking in its disrespect for art, and so Freudian as an esthetic Oedipal revolt, ever considered a blow against male chauvinism and its construction of woman as a devouring monster? It seems so here -- but the drawing isn’t so much eradicated as given a lighter touch.
Rauschenberg obliterated his de Kooning in 1953, during the dramatically avant-garde decade in which he also made empty white enamel paintings (designed as surfaces for cast shadows, in 1951) and painted the more-or-less identical Factum I and Factum II (as a poke at "Abstract Expressionist" authenticity, in 1957). For his "Not Robert Rauschenberg: Erased de Kooning Drawing" series, Bidlo drew copies of de K’s Surrealist portrait of a bug-eyed Elaine de Kooning from ca. 1940-41 through the "Women" series of the 1950s to a late Screaming Girls from 1967-68.
Rauschenberg’s de Kooning is now of no consequence, a mere generic marker. But Bidlo’s de K’s are all canonical, well-known, iconic. Before he proceeded, Bidlo sought Rauschenberg’s okay for the project. The master of Captiva, Fla., who turns 90 next month, sent up his sage advice: "All artists take their chances."