Charles Burki: Streamliners

Charles Burki is not well known in the English-speaking world, as a Dutch illustrator/designer whose work was primarily published in Europe in the 1920s-70s. Burki was actually born in 1909 in Indonesia when it was a Dutch colony (the Dutch East Indies), in Magelang, Mid-Java, where his father was an architect. He received his primary education there, and showed an early aptitude for drawing, and a love for motorcycles and cars, a passion he apparently inherited from his father.  By 1924 his drawings of motorcycles were being published in Holland in Sport in Beeld,  That year, at age 15, he purchased his first motorcycle, a BSA 500cc Sloper, which began a lifelong love for fast British motorcycles.

He moved to the Netherlands in 1929 to pursue a degree in architecture, in Delft, and was an enthusiastic supporter of motorcycle racing, especially the Dutch TT at Assen. At races he would sketch the riders and their machines, noting their various riding styles and of course the details of their mounts, in a golden age of 1930s racing.  In 1932 he moved to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and remained there for three years, making connections at Moto Revue and regularly contributing illustrations for the magazine.  That includes these spectacular 1932 studies of fantastical streamlined racers, for an article discussing the need to split the air efficiently, as opposed to simply applying more power (puissance in French) to push against the atmosphere.

When Burki’s father died in 1935, he was forced to give up his Parisian life, and returned to the Hague to secure his reputation as an illustrator, and earn his own living.  He met and married Sophia in 1938, and the couple took a honeymoon in their Norton International M30 with a Steib sidecar, riding to Genoa in Italy in high style.  From Genoa, they took a boat with their sidecar to the Dutch East Indies, and decided to remain in there.   In 1942,  Japan declared war on the Netherlands, and occupied Indonesia: Charles and Sophia Burki were taken as prisoners of war, which began an extremely dark period of their lives.  Burki documents the nightmare of imprisonment in his 1979 book ‘Achter de Kawat’ (‘Behind the Barbed Wire’), which includes drawings he was able to make while imprisoned, on scraps of paper, while at a camp in Bandung for 14 months.

When he learned he would be transferred to Japan as part of their slave labor force (1944), Burki carefully rolled up his drawings in cotton sheets inside a sealed zinc tube, which was placed in a tarred wooden box and buried near the entrance of the prison camp. Burki was shipped to Nagasaki on the ill-fated cargo ship Tomahuku Maru, which was torpedoed by a US submarine the USS Tang (SS-306), and 560 of the 772 prisoners were killed, within Nagasaki harbor.  Burki survived, and was sent to the Fukuoka 14 labor camp.  On August 9, 1945, the Fat Man nuclear bomb exploded a mere 2 kilometers from the Fukuoka camp, yet miraculously, Burki survived unharmed, while 40,000 others perished directly from the bomb.  The Japanese surrendered after this second nuclear attack, and eventually Burki was able to return to Indonesia, where he located his wife Sophia, who had survived her own harrowing experiences as a prisoner.

In December 1945, Charles and Sophia Burki returned to the Netherlands, where he took up his illustration career once again, which was extremely successful.  A talented illustrator proved invaluable during the period of rapid economic growth in Europe in the 1940s and 50s, and Burki’s client list was impressive: besides numerous magazines, he became the visual voice for DAF, Shell, Philips, KLM, Goodyear, etc.   His futuristic ideas for cars and motorcycles were an inspiration to designers, and he also provided illustrations for hundreds of books of literature and poetry.  He lived in the Hague until 1994: sadly, the only books published about/by him are in Dutch, but we reviewed one of them here.