Rauschenberg's style derived from his ability to marry Schwitters's magpie sensibility with a sense of scale, and of the grand gesture, that he'd learned from the Abstract Expressionist painters whose work he had gotten to know after arriving in New York in 1949: artists like Jack Tworkov (
a fervent early supporter), Franz Kline, and, of course, Willem de Kooning, whose own art would become raw material for Rauschenberg's famous Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953).