Considering them both to be transformative figures, Steinberg located a particularly significant moment of transition in contemporary art at large in Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing from 1953, a seminal piece of
conceptual gamesmanship that the artist created by asking Willem de Kooning for an intricate layered
work of ink, graphite, crayon, and charcoal and then
meticulously erasing it.