GUILLAUME CORNEILLE
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 Amsterdam School of Fine Arts, he began his artistic activity inspired by surrealism.
In July 1948, Corneille, together with Constant, Jan Nieuwenhuys, and Karel Appel, founded the magazine Reflex, in which he reaffirmed the importance of artistic research even more than the work itself.
Also in 1948, on the terrace of the Notre Dame café in Paris, the founders of the magazine Reflex 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 derived from the first letters of their hometowns: Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. The group members opposed aesthetics in painting and bourgeois art in general. The group exhibited in two major collective shows: one in Amsterdam in 1949 and one in Liège in 1951, during which the group disbanded.
After a period working at the workshop of the engraver Stanley William Hayter in Paris, he went to Albissola where, together with Asger Jorn, he devoted himself to ceramic work.
In 1949 he made his first trip to North Africa and throughout the 1950s he traveled between Africa, the Americas, and the Antilles. These journeys also contributed to giving him a new artistic sensitivity, and Corneille gradually abandoned abstract art 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 vivid colors and whose outlines are often highlighted by sharp and dark contours.
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 Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and in 1973 at the Charleroi Museum.
His artwork evokes a personal and imaginary world, a universe populated by flowers, birds, and women. From 1980 to 1987 Corneille participated 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.
