Guillaume Corneille

Belgium, 1922-2010

Corneille, Cornelis van Beverloo was born in 1922 in Liege in Belgium.Corneille studied art at the Academy of Art in Amsterdam, Holland. He was one of the founders of the REFLEX movement in 1948 and in 1949 he was also one of the founders of the COBRA group in Denmark, which has had great influence on Scandinavian art.

He was active within the group from the beginning, not only painting but also publishing poetry in the Cobra magazine.

The poetic Corneille was strongly influenced by Miro and Klee. After the group dissolved in 1951 he moved to Paris and began collecting African art. These primitive artifacts became evident in his works, which began to take on a more imaginative style, like landscapes seen from a birds eye view, exotic birds and stylised forms.

While Corneille lived and worked in Paris, he used to make visits to Israel where he worked in the Jaffa Atalier. On the 24th of September 2003, there was an opening of his exhibition of prints in the Ramat-Gan Museum of Art, Israel.

Corneille's style is considered imaginative and poetic. He is known by his eccentric use of color and the placing of familiar subjects in his works, such as cats, birds, and women, in mythological or juvenile settings.

His works are part of collections at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art in the Netherlands, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among others.

He died on September 5, 2010 in Paris, France.