From 5 February to 29 April, the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam will present the exhibition entitled Jan Elburg. Experimental Painter and Poet. The exhibition is a comprehensive overview of all aspects of his artistic calling. Paintings, drawings, gouaches, monoprints, candle-wax compositions, (photo)collages and pop-art-like assemblages demonstrate, along with his poems, the creativeness of Jan Elburg. Besides the visual work, an ample choice of his poetry can be seen and heard. Jan Elburg taught at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, where he had great influence upon the students.

Jan Elburg (Wemeldinge 1919 – Amsterdam 1992) is regarded as one of the most original poets of De Vijftigers (‘poets in the fifties’) who made a permanent impact on Dutch poetry. Along with the poets Gerrit Kouwenaar and Lucebert, Elburg joined up with the painters of the CoBrA Group in 1948, which included Karel Appel, Constant and Corneille. He was an active member of the CoBrA movement, published poems in Reflex, the magazine of the Experimentele Groep in Holland, and in the fourth edition of the CoBrA magazine. With collages, objects and poetic fragments of text, Elburg made a legendary contribution to the CoBrA exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1949. It is remarkable that he could manifest himself as both a poet and an artist.

Entirely in the idiom of CoBrA, he created a series of impressive colourful gouaches in 1952. In 1953 and 1956, Elburg engaged himself with monoprints, a printing technique in which only one print is made. Elburg made his photomontages and assemblages from the late 1940s onward, right up to his death in 1992. In these works he sought to produce an effect of alienation, working in the surrealistic sphere that plays a role in the background of all of Elburg’s work. The connection of art and social engagement runs as a leitmotiv through Elburg’s literary and visual work. This idea also lies at the foundation of the series of works in which waste materials form the basis of expressionist paintings. Under the influence of the pop art movement, everyday objects from the consumer society were elevated to the status of art.

Just like Lucebert, Jan Elburg was a double talent and one of the Vijftigers who rejected traditional poetry. Important poetry collections by Jan Elburg include Serenade voor Lena (1941), Klein t(er)reurspel (1947), Door de nacht (1948), Drietand (1960), Streep door de rekening (1966), Contravormen (1971), Praatjes kijken (1975) and Haaks op de uitvlucht (1988).

The Vijftigers had an aversion to what they called ‘artificial’ and they preferred spontaneous poetry free of all kinds of form-determining restrictions. They used almost no rhyme, no regular verse forms or punctuation. Everything that was an obstacle to freedom had to be eliminated. This attitude corresponds to that of the CoBrA Group. They, too, sought a new creativeness, without rules. Their art is spontaneous, vital, colourful and imaginative. The exhibition shows that Jan Elburg's experiments in word and image made him a CoBrA artist pur sang.

Jan Elburg and the collection

The Stedelijk Museum Schiedam is the owner of the largest collection of works by Jan Elburg. The oeuvre is a part of the Schiedam CoBrA collection, formed by the work from the Dutch branch of the CoBrA movement: Karel Appel, Eugène Brands, Constant, Corneille, Lucebert, Jan Nieuwenhuijs, Anton Rooskens and Theo Wolvecamp. The exhibition of the work of Jan Elburg dovetails with the Solo CoBrA series by means of which the museum keeps the ideas of the CoBrA movement alive.

Museum shop

To accompany the exhibition, a biography on Jan Elburg by Jan van der Vegt, an anthology of his poems, and an anthology containing the correspondence between Jan Elburg and the poet will be published. These three works will be issued by Meulenhoff Publishers and will be on sale in the Museum shop.