What are the origins of the curly letters that are often found adorning café windows across the city of Amsterdam? Who painted them? How old is the style and where were they designed? Do the letters represent an expression of the Amsterdam graphic tradition?
Venice has stencil, London has Gill Sans and Amsterdam has what locals refer to as “Krulletters”—highly ornamented script painted with a brush, whose history is closely linked to Amsterdam’s traditional cafes and bars known as ‘brown bars’.
This Dutch tradition of letter design, which was overlooked until very recently. In1983 the trade magazine, ‘Grafisch Nederland’ published an issue including an article entitled ‘Kijk! Letters!’ (Look! Letters!), with pictures of several pub facades bearing the style along with an interview with Leo Beukeboom, one of the two people responsible for painting it.
Leo Beukeboom was a talented and prolific sign painter, responsible for many of the best ‘Krulletter’ that still can be found in Amsterdam and neighbouring cities. He began painting them in 1967 when he was hired by the Heineken Brewery to be its in-house letter painter and to provide services to the pubs sponsored by the firm. But the history of the style goes back further than that. It was created by the sign painter Jan Willem Visser who from the early 50s to 1968 worked for the Amstel Brewery (the company was sold to Heineken that same year, almost at the same time as Leo Beukeboom began painting the style for Heineken).
It is now a concern that Amsterdam might be about to lose one of the most distinctive and beautiful elements of its graphic identity. Many of the window displays with the painted letters had been lost forever due to renovations of bars or changes in ownership, and there are no letter painters left in the area with the skills to paint the style properly.
In beautiful black and white, photographer Rob Becker documented all existing windows in Amsterdam, Maastricht and Gent in order to capture the ambience and context in which the curly script flourished forming a true artistic homage to the Amsterdam ‘brown’ cafés.
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