“ He really made me suffer,” Rauschenberg recalled. De Kooning took out an entire portfolio of drawings and leafed through them. “I want to give you one that I’ll miss,” he told Rauschenberg, adding, “I want it to be very hard to erase.” The one he chose was a “dense mixed-media image that contained, Rauschenberg said, ‘charcoal, lead, everything. It took me two months and even then it wasn’t completely erased. I wore out a lot of erasers.’
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This is a great story, and a great obit.
