One day in 1953, a young and at the time little-known experimental artist named Robert Rauschenberg arrived at the studio of the great abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning bearing a bottle of Jack Daniels and a strange request. He wanted the famous artist to give him one of his drawings so he could erase it. De Kooning was taken aback. “I remember that the idea of destruction kept coming into the conversation,” Rauschenberg later r...