An occasional series of works of art, pieces of music, events and so on that is as old as me. That is things that were born in 1953!

ROBERT RAUSCHEBERG 

'ERASED DE KOONING DRAWING' 1953

The piece "Erased De Kooning Drawing" by Bob Rauschenberg in 1953 was a revolutionary act. He was abosultley trepididatious about committing the act and is said to have discussed it at length with fellow artist Jasper Johns and fellow friends before forcing the times to go and ask  De Kooning himself and its philosophical drive and statement led him to let him loose on a real drawing rather than some mere discarded doodle much to Willem's credit. Later in the 1980s it was x-rayed by another artist to try to 'see' what the original had maybe looked like to bring the story full circle. 

Artsy says:

Robert Rauschenberg

American, 1925–2008

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Robert Rauschenberg’s enthusiasm for popular culture and, with his contemporary Jasper Johns, his rejection of the angst and seriousness of the Abstract Expressionists led him to search for a new way of painting. A prolific innovator of techniques and mediums, he used unconventional art materials ranging from dirt and house paint to umbrellas and car tires. In the early 1950s, Rauschenberg was already gaining a reputation as the art world’s enfant terrible with works such as Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), for which he requested a drawing (as well as permission) from Willem de Kooning, and proceeded to rub away the image until only ghostly marks remained on the paper. By 1954, Rauschenberg completed his first three-dimensional collage paintings—he called them Combines—in which he incorporated discarded materials and mundane objects to explore the intersection of art and life. “I think a picture is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world,” he said. In 1964 he became the first American to win the International Grand Prize in Painting at the Venice Biennale. The 1/4 Mile or Two Furlong Piece (1981–98), a cumulative artwork, embodies his spirit of eclecticism, comprising a retrospective overview of his many discrete periods, including painting, fabric collage, sculptural composition

Rauschenberg’s action, which one writer described as "genteel iconoclasm," is loaded with symbolism. A collector is entitled to destroy art that he has legally purchased, but if an artist destroys the work of another artist, the result is a new work of art. In this particular case, de Kooning approved beforehand. Rauschenberg is said to have gone to de Kooning’s studio and expressed his interest in erasing one of his drawings as an artistic act; de Kooning, intrigued, offered him one. In fact, the older artist played along eagerly, deciding that it was not sufficient to give Rauschenberg a drawing he would have discarded anyway, nor one in pencil, which was too easy to erase completely. Instead, he provided a multimedia work that included both ink and crayon. Rauschenberg devoted a month of off-and-on rubbing to get the paper mostly clear.