However, Elburg was also a visual artist (and a teacher at the later Rietveld Academy, and an advertising man – he coined the famous DAF slogan ‘het pientere pookje’ (‘the smart stick shift’)). A substantial part of his oeuvre consists not only of poetry, but also of paintings, collages, drawings and objects. Part of it belongs to the collection of the Cobra Museum and is regularly exhibited during collection presentations. The paintings fit in well with the Cobra style; think for example of Zwaaiend kind met parachute (‘Waving child with parachute’), clearly influenced by children’s drawings. The collages, on the other hand, bear a much stronger resemblance to dada and surrealism. In his literary work, too, he was recalcitrant and liked to turn language upside down. One of his best-known lines reverses a well-known cliché: ‘Prijs de dag voor het avond is’ (‘Praise the day before the evening has come’. A good English equivalent would be: ‘Count your chickens before they hatch.’).

Elburg’s poetry was included in the high-profile anthologies Atonaal (Atonal) and Vijf 5tigers (Five 5tyers), which were important for the way the Vijfigers’ poetry was received. Curiously enough, Simon Vinkenoog, who composed Atonaal, wanted to keep Elburg out of his anthology, because he didn’t think him experimental enough. But Lucebert pressured him to change his mind. As said, he was present in the poets cage, but he also made a visual contribution – a controversial one at that. The fourth edition of the Cobra magazine was also the catalogue for the exhibition, and it contained Elburg’s collage La putain de classe: the whore of class. It showed the body of Titian’s famous Venus of Urbino, but with the head of an older American woman. Three voyeurs were staring at her. This led to such a commotion – at an exhibition that was not devoid of scandals – that the issue in question was no longer allowed to be sold in the Stedelijk.

At the beginning of the 2010s, Elburg was in the spotlight again – albeit in a rather small circle, but still – thanks to a number of publications. In 2012 Jan van der Vegt’s Elburg biography De man met de drietand (The man with the trident) was published, as well as the anthology Ik zie scherper door de taal: Een bloemlezing uit zijn gedichten (I see more clearly through the language: An anthology of his poems). A letter book was also published which contained part of his correspondence with the largely unknown fellow Vijftiger Koos Schuur (1915-1995). ‘Rehabilitation’ or ‘rediscovery’ would be too big a word, but Elburg was once again being written about – and his visual work was regularly discussed again too.