Artist

Guillaume Corneille

Guillaume Corneille (1922–2010) was a co-founder of the influential CoBrA movement. His work is instantly recognisable by its exuberant colours and recurring motifs of birds, women, sun and landscape. At Kunstuitleen.nl you can rent or buy work by Corneille, free on trial at home.

95 artworks in our collection

Corneille is a passionate creator of forms and colors, for whom lithography is one of the finest forms of expression: under the press, his images are permanently fixed, as if petrified, starkly contrasting with the cheerful colors. This is what artist Enrico Baj writes about Corneille, with whom he collaborated for some time in Paris in 1964. Corneille’s works are always exuberant with color and often resemble a passage from a story or poem. This is also evident from the many letters Corneille wrote to his fellow artist friends. Corneille traveled extensively to virtually every corner of the world, and he often described his experiences accompanied by small sketches. Corneille was born in 1922 as Guillaume Corneille van Beverloo in Liège (Belgium) to Dutch parents. In 1940, Corneille moved to Amsterdam, where he took a course in drawing and etching at the Rijksacademie voor Beeldende Kunsten. As a painter, Corneille was self-taught. His distant travels were his greatest source of inspiration. In his early work from the 1950s, Africa was a major source of inspiration. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Central America and the Caribbean influenced his work; the colors are more exuberant and share many similarities with the folk art he encountered there. Corneille is also fascinated by women, cats, birds, and the sun, and these elements—whether in combination with one another or not—often play a role in his work. For Corneille, the woman is the muse, the most important source of inspiration. The bird is Corneille’s alter ego; his name means “crow” in French. The bird is the animal that can break free from the earth and is a symbol of lust and passion. The cats in his work represent sensuality—a human or animal that longs to be caressed. Finally, the sun is the symbol of freedom, which emerged after the dark years of the war in an explosion of color and expression among the young experimental painters. In 1948, Corneille, together with Karel Appel, Constant, and others, founded the Dutch Experimental Group. Later that year, this group represented the “Amsterdam” branch of the Cobra group, which had been founded in Paris. Cobra was a collective of emerging painters from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. They adopted the coiled cobra as their symbol. Although Cobra existed for only three years, it became so widely known that the group “lives on” to this day. In 1950, Corneille moved to Paris. He continued to travel all over the world but still considered Paris a sort of “home base.” Corneille’s work can be seen all over the world. For example, he has had an exhibition in nearly every major city in the world, or one is currently underway. His work can also be admired on items such as watches and ties, which makes it accessible today to a younger audience that does not (yet) have the means to purchase one of his artworks.

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Artwork by Guillaume Corneille