Description

Robert Rauschenberg & Susan Weil – The Blueprints, 1950
Publisher: Stanley/Barker, 2025
Hardcover, 80 pages, English
Size: 30x24cm
New in seal

In the summer of 1949, Susan Weil introduced her partner Robert Rauschenberg to the process of exposing blueprint paper at her family home in Connecticut. What began as a playful experiment rooted in Weil’s childhood memories grew into a striking series of large-scale works. Weil and Rauschenberg laid sheets of light-sensitive paper in the sun, arranging everyday objects and human figures to capture fleeting silhouettes and delicate traces of presence in hues of deep blue.

This new publication brings together the complete collaborative blueprint works from this short but influential period, alongside rare photographs by Wallace Kirkland, who documented Susan and Robert’s collaboration in New York, in images that display the erasure women artists so often faced, even in their own stories.

At the heart of the book is a new interview between Susan Weil and writer Lou Stoppard, exploring the long summer on Outer Island and the years the couple spent working side by side as young artists in New York and Paris. The book stands not only as an archive of historically important works, but also as a record of a relationship, a creative partnership that unfolded into marriage, parenthood and, eventually, separation, as their lives and practices moved apart.

Designed as an intimate object, bound in litho-printed linen that carries the quiet resonance of the cyanotype, with a bellyband inspired by the sun-faded paper of the works themselves.

For all women who were abstract artists, you were investigating your complicated thoughts about being an individual and everything. It wasn’t so simple or direct as being a statement, ‘I want my place in the world’, but it was about trying to be at one with your own work and take it seriously and have a sense of force.” – Susan Weil

“This book directs attention both to the importance of blueprints in the history of photography – particular in terms of innovations by female artists – and also, most importantly, to Susan Weil as a significant and innovative artist. It was she who set her then husband Robert Rauschenberg on a path that would later define his practice, and I am thrilled to have had the chance to tell that story, and to celebrate Weil’s knowledge and vision. .” –  Lou Stoppard