The Blueprints of Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil, 1950. STANLEY/BARKER, 2025

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 soon transformed into a striking series of large-scale works. Together they laid sheets of light-sensitive paper in the sun, arranging objects and human figures to capture fleeting silhouettes and delicate traces of presence preserved in deep blue.

Though the couple would eventually part, Rauschenberg continued to work with cyanotypes throughout his career, even as Weil’s authorship quietly faded from the accepted narrative. The book stands not only as an archive of historically significant works, but as a record of a relationship and creative partnership that unfolded into marriage, parenthood, and, eventually, separation, as their lives and practices diverged.

This new publication brings together the complete collaborative works from this brief but influential period, along with unseen photographs by Wallace Kirkland, who documented their time in New York in images that reflect the erasure women artists so often faced, even within 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.

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