Weil had learned to make cyanotypes as a child with her grandmother who, as a young woman, had made self-portraits with the rolls of blueprint paper in her architect father\u2019s office. The tradition was passed down through the family, and Weil and her brother would spend their summers on the island creating blue monochrome vignettes of flowers, shells and other found objects. Years later, when the young married artists spent the summer of 1949 on the island, Rauschenberg was equally captivated by the magical process.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rauschenberg, who died in 2008, would of course go on to become one of America\u2019s most eminent artists. His explorations into abstract expressionism are credited with having anticipated pop art. Weil, now 95, continues an equally prolific, if less recognised, career as an artist. Her lifelong commitment to art has encompassed painting, photography and experimental pieces in a continual effort to expand painting beyond the two dimensions of the canvas.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The pair initially met while attending the Acad\u00e9mie Julian in Paris in the late 1940s. \u201cWe were both obsessed with painting \u2013 we were really zany painters. We wanted \u2013 needed \u2013 to paint every minute, all the time,\u201d recalls Weil, speaking to Lou Stoppard in an interview featured in the book. Despite it feeling like \u201ccenturies ago\u201d, Weil also remembers the time spent with Rauschenberg on Outer Island and their first experiments with blueprint. \u201cIt was something we did for the pleasure of it and the beauty of it. It was the summer break from art school and Bob stayed with my family on their small island. We painted a lot and I talked about my childhood blueprint fun.\u201d Acquiring a roll of blueprint paper from an architectural supplies shop, they set to work making compositions starring Weil\u2019s brother, who, aged three, was the perfect size to fit comfortably on the paper. They surrounded him with seawood and detritus they found on the beach. \u201cWe felt like we were exploring something together,\u201d she says.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The duo would continue the process when they returned to New York, working on even larger scale blueprints in the garden of their small apartment or inside the shared kitchen and bathroom, using an ultraviolet bulb to develop their pure blue vignettes. For Weil, part of the appeal of the blueprint lay in the potential scale of the artworks \u2013 the larger the paper, the larger the images. With big enough paper, it became possible to create full-size images using adults as models. \u201cI really wanted to be very active in my work \u2013 and the scale has something to do with that,\u201d she explained. \u201cFor all women who were abstract artists, you were investigating your complicated thoughts about being an individual and everything. It wasn\u2019t so simple or direct as being a statement \u2013 \u2018I want my place in the world\u2019 \u2013 but it was about trying to be at one with your own work and take it seriously and have a sense of force.\u201d<\/p>\n The abstract art movement in 1950s New York was a boy\u2019s club, dominated by the archetypal myth of the \u201cavant-garde\u201d male artist. The American modernist painter Hans Hofmann once reportedly paid his student Lee Krasner the dubious compliment of saying, \u201cThis painting is so good, you\u2019d never know it was done by a woman.\u201d In the same conversation, he acknowledged Krasner\u2019s huge influence on the work of her husband, Jackson Pollock. It\u2019s an anecdote that perfectly encapsulates the erasure and negation of women from the abstract art world right across the 20th-century. Weil\u2019s works are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the J Paul Getty Museum in California, to name a few, yet she has not received the critical consideration of so many of her male peers.\u00a0<\/p>\n At the time of their marriage, Weil was part of the protest and activism group, New York Professional Women Artists. \u201cI took my work very seriously, and then when people were rough on women, I resented it,\u201d she explains. \u201cI was certainly a big part of the women\u2019s movement when it happened; involved in several groups, and so on \u2026 It feels awful. To be not considered because you\u2019re a woman: it\u2019s a very sick thing. It really is. It\u2019s the idea that women are supposed to stay home and take care of the children and the cooking, and that\u2019s what you\u2019re supposed to do \u2026 Most people felt that men were the more important makers of the art, and so they chose to focus on the men.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>
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Courtesy of the artists<\/p>\n<\/a>
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Photography by Wallace Kirkland for Life Magazine<\/p>\n
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Photography by Wallace Kirkland for Life Magazine<\/p>\n