Bruce Silverstein is pleased to present A Walk through Astoria and Other Places in Queens, 1943 by Rudolph Burkhardt and Edwin Denby. Consisting of 71 vintage gelatin silver prints and five typed sonnets, this original unpublished album is the third of three monumental albums produced in collaboration between the two artists – the first, New York, N. Why?, 1939 (collection the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and the second, An Afternoon in Astoria, 1940 (collection Museum of Modern Art).
The photographer and filmmaker Rudolph Burckhardt (1914–1999) arrived in New York in 1935 from his native Switzerland, where he quickly became immersed in the city’s avant-garde circles. His life-long friend, the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby (1903–1983), introduced him to several artists, composers –together they befriended their neighbor, an unknown painter at the time, Willem de Kooning. The two dear friends would become essential figures in the downtown cultural bohemian scene over the next several decades, with friends and artistic collaborators including John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Franz Kline, Joseph Cornell, Larry Rivers, Alex Katz, Red Grooms, and many others.