Guillaume Corneille biography

Corneille Guillaume van Beverloo, known as Corneille, was a Belgian painter, engraver, and sculptor. He was born in Liège, Belgium, on July 3, 1922. After graduating from the School of Fine Arts in Amsterdam, he began his artistic career inspired by surrealism.
In July 1948, Corneille, along with Constant, Jan Nieuwenhuys, and Karel Appel, founded the magazine Reflex, in which they emphasized the importance of artistic research even more than the artwork itself. Also in 1948, on the terrace of the Notre Dame café in Paris, the founders of the Reflex magazine were joined by Christian Dotremont and Joseph Noiret from Belgium and Asger Jorn from Denmark to form the CoBrA group, a name coined by Dotremont and derived from the first letters of their hometowns: Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. The members of the group opposed aesthetics in painting and bourgeois art in general. The group exhibited in two major collective exhibitions: one in Amsterdam in 1949 and one in Liège in 1951, during which the group disbanded.
After a period of work at the workshop of the engraver Stanley William Hayter in Paris, he goes to Albissola where, together with Asger Jorn, he dedicates himself to the activity of a ceramist.
In 1949, he made his first trip to North Africa, and throughout the 1950s, he traveled between Africa, the Americas, and the Antilles. These trips, which also contributed to giving him a new artistic sensitivity, led Corneille to gradually abandon abstractionism to return to a new figuration. From then on, he painted canvases, produced significant graphic works, and created sculptures and ceramic objects characterized by rich and vibrant colors, with profiles often highlighted by sharp and dark outlines.
His first solo exhibition was in 1950 in Copenhagen, while his solo exhibition in Paris at the Salon de Mai was in 1951.
In 1956, he was awarded the Guggenheim Prize. Two other major retrospectives were dedicated to him in 1966 at the Stadelijk Museum in Amsterdam and in 1973 at the Museum of Charleroi.
His art evokes a personal and imaginary world, a universe populated with flowers, birds, and women. From 1980 to 1987, Corneille will participate in numerous retrospectives dedicated to the Cobra movement both in France and abroad. Corneille died in Auvers-sur-Oise in Belgium on September 5, 2010.