The Blueprints, 1950

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. 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

Shipping world wide now. 

Pages - 80

Size - 30x24cm 

Details - Cloth covered flexibound / Belly band