The Burghers of Amsterdam AvenueElaine de Kooning

Signed lower right. Abstract Expressionism. The Burghers of Amsterdam Avenue was shown at an exhibition of Elaine de Kooning’s portraits at the Graham Gallery in NY in April-May 1963. It’s arguably her most famous individual painting, and is over 14 meters wide in scale. A friend of Elaine’s, Sherman Drexler, was teaching an art class at the Riverside Hospital, on North Brother Island in the East River. While visiting there, Elaine offered to paint some of his students. The hospital was to rehibilite juvenile drug addicts and young people with psychological problems. The seven men sitting down were attendees of the hospital, while the two men standing on the left are her two assistants, Eddie Johnson and Robert Corless. Corless was also a heavy drug user and sadly died due to his drug addiction during the 1970’s. The poet, Frank Lima, is said to be sitting in the centre-front of the portrait. There are several Dutch connotations within the picture. Noting of course, that Elaine’s husband was Dutch (Willem De Kooning), she changes the name of the 1880’s Rodin sculpture, The Burghers of Calais, to use ‘Amsterdam’ Avenue, which runs through Manhattan into ‘Harlem’; while originally, New York’s name was New Amsterdam. In addition she wanted to arrange the picture like a monumental early 17th century multi-figure Dutch portrait, such as Rembrandt’s Night Watch, or a Franz Hals family scene for example. In Rodin’s sculpture, the noblemen of Calais are surrendering the town to the English during the Hundred Year’s War. This would infer that her intention was to elevate the young men in the portrait to a high social status, or perhaps even lordship. She also wanted to paint a political picture, and this was the perfect time. She had just sat with JFK in December 1962, and again in January 1963, to paint a portrait of the president for the Truman Library in Missouri, so was currently a highly newsworthy individual in general. This painting provided the perfect opportunity for her to raise awareness to the widespread issues of drug addiction in NY in the early 1960’s and the effect that it was having on young people of all cultural backgrounds at the time. To that end, the painting had a significant write-up in Newsweek, while the show was also covered by Time Magazine, The New York Times and The Herald Tribune’. Another angle was that she wanted to bring these young men and their story to the viewer in the gallery, where normally they would not have any visibility or a voice. ‘I wanted the paint to sweep through, as feelings sweep through’ she said. The painting makes the ultimate social statement in every capacity imaginable, and is one of the most important and epic NY paintings of the period.