blueprints (1949–51)
In 1949 at her family home in Outer Island, Connecticut, Susan Weil introduced Rauschenberg to the method of exposing blueprint paper to light to make negative images of objects and human subjects lying atop the paper (the paper surrounding the items turned blue, while the paper underneath them remained white). Weil and Rauschenberg collaborated on these blueprint works, also known as cyanotypes, through 1951. Some of the works were featured in a 1951 article in Life magazine, and Rauschenberg later included a miniature cyanotype in at least one of the Combines. The artists did not conceive of the blueprints as a series.
