Corneille

Corneille (Guil­laume Cor­nelis van Bev­er­loo) was born in 1922 in Liège, Bel­gium. He grew up in the Nether­lands and stud­ied at the Art Acad­e­my in Ams­ter­dam from 1940 to 1943. In 1947 he joined the artist move­ment Reflux. In 1948 Corneille, Karel Appel and Con­stant Nieuwen­huys left the move­ment and found­ed the artist group CoBrA, to which he belonged until it was dis­solved in 1951. Char­ac­ter­is­tic for the style of the CoBrA group was the ref­er­ence to children’s draw­ings and a strong, bright col­or scheme. Although Corneille was based on the CoBrA group, his infor­mal paint­ing style was more con­trolled. From 1950 Corneille lived and worked in Paris. In the fol­low­ing time he made numer­ous trips to Africa, Asia and South Amer­i­ca. In the 1950s, with the dis­so­lu­tion of the CoBrA group, there was a change in the Corneille style. The trips had a calm­ing effect on his fig­u­ra­tive style. He was impressed by the vari­ety of col­ors, the strict expres­sion of the stat­ues and masks of for­eign cul­tures. He gained spe­cial impres­sions on a trip to Cuba. From this point on, the woman-bird-palm motif appeared reg­u­lar­ly. Corneille took part in the doc­u­men­ta II (1959) Art after 1945, Paint­ing — Sculp­ture — Print­mak­ing and in the doc­u­men­ta III (1964) inter­na­tion­al exhi­bi­tion in Kas­sel. Corneille died in 2010 in Auvers-sur-Oise in France. 1998 — first exhi­bi­tion in the Welz gallery.