A Famous Artwork Made By Deleting

This piece of art is literally a blank sheet of paper created by erasing a drawing. Artist Robert Rauschenberg convinced a master painter to give him a sketch just so he could spend a month scrubbing it away.

Rauschenberg wanted to see if an artwork could be created solely through the act of destruction. He approached Willem de Kooning, a legendary artist, to sacrifice one of his own charcoal works for this conceptual experiment. It took Rauschenberg weeks to remove the marks until only faint ghosts of the original remained. Today, the piece challenges our definition of creativity and shows how absence can be as powerful as presence.