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 on Outer Island, Connecticut. What began as a playful experiment rooted in Weil’s childhood memories grew into a striking series of large-scale works created together. 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.

This new publication brings together the complete blueprint works from this short but influential period, alongside rare photographs by Life magazine photographer Wallace Kirkland, who documented Susan and Robert’s collaboration in New York — images that quietly hint at 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 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.

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 

Published - Mid October 

Pages - 80

Details - Cloth covered flexibound / Belly band