Guillaume (Corneille) Cornelis Beverloo

Guillaume Cornelis van Beverloo was born on July 3rd 1922 in Liege, Belgium . His parents were Dutch and moved back to the Netherlands when he was 12. He is better known under his pseudonym Corneille (crow in French). Corneille was a painter, printmaker, ceramists, poet and writer. Corneille initially trained in drawing and engraving at the Amsterdam Rijksakademie (1940 to 1943), but is considered a self taught painter. His earlier work had been naturalistic. In 1945 he was inspired by the joie de vivre of French painters, and in particular by the work of younger artists such as Edouard Pignon (1905-1993), which led him to adopt a lyrically Cubist style. In 1947Corneille visited Hungary returning to the Netherlands in 1948. In 1948 Corneille was one of the founders of the Nederlandse Experimentele Groep  (NEG), which published the periodical  ‘Reflex’ ; and one of the founders of the COBRA movement, which has had great influence on Scandinavian art. As a co-founder of COBRA (the experimental artists group), he became a leading abstract expressionist painter and printmaker along with such notables as Karel Appel(1921-2006), Pierre Alechinksy (b.1927), Asger Jorn(1914-1973) and Jean Dubbuffet (1901-1985). In addition to painting he also published poetry in the COBRA magazine. On his return from travels in North Africa Corneille participated in the 1949 NEG and CoBrA exhibitions at the Galerie Colette Allendy in Paris and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1950 Corneille settled permanently in Paris and began exhibiting at the Salon de Mai. He studied etching with Stanley William Hayter in 1953 in Paris, and ceramics with Tullio Mazzotti in Albisola, Italy, during the summers of 1954 and 1955.