ArtistDutch-Belgian
Beverloo Corneille
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Born in Liege, Belgium, to Dutch parents in 1922, Guillaume Cornelis van Beverloo grew up between two countries and two languages, a duality that would shape his entire artistic life. He adopted the name Corneille early on, a French form that suited an artist who would eventually settle in Paris and draw inspiration from every continent.
Corneille studied drawing at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam from 1940 to 1943, years when the German occupation cast a long shadow over Dutch cultural life. His first solo exhibition took place in 1946 at Het Beerenhuis in Groningen. Two years later, in July 1948, he co-founded the Dutch Experimentele Groep alongside Karel Appel, Constant Nieuwenhuys, and others, publishing the journal Reflex as a manifesto for spontaneous, anti-academic art. By November of that year, the Dutch contingent had joined forces with Danish and Belgian artists to form CoBrA, one of the most consequential avant-garde movements of the postwar period. The name itself combined the first letters of Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam.
A turning point came in 1949 when Corneille traveled to the south of Tunisia, following a path Paul Klee had taken in 1914. The Saharan light and color hit him like a revelation. He ventured deep into the Hoggar Mountains of southern Algeria, where he encountered the geometric art of the Tuareg people and Tifinagh, a script dating back thousands of years. These forms, loose and reinterpreted, began filtering into his compositions. Africa would remain a lifelong source, and after settling in Paris in 1950, he also started collecting African art, which further informed his visual vocabulary.
When CoBrA dissolved in 1951, Corneille continued to evolve independently. His early work had been raw and expressionistic, close to the movement's collective spirit. Through the 1950s, his paintings shifted toward aerial landscapes, as if the earth were seen from a great height, with parched surfaces recalling the desert terrain he had crossed. By the 1960s, his style had transformed again into the joyful, almost folkloric imagery for which he became widely recognized: brilliantly colored birds, sensuous women, playful cats, and radiant suns. The influence of Joan Miro's surrealism and Paul Klee's color theory ran through this work, but Corneille's voice was unmistakably his own, balancing sophistication with childlike directness.
Recognition came steadily. He received the Prix de la Critique in 1951 and the Guggenheim International Award for the Netherlands in 1956. His first major solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam followed in 1957, and in 1959 his work appeared in the Younger European Artists exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Retrospectives were held at the Musee d'Antibes in 1963, the Stedelijk Museum again in 1966, and the Charleroi Museum in 1973. In 1992, he was awarded the Dutch State Prize for Painting. His work is held by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
Corneille worked prolifically across mediums: paintings, gouaches, lithographs, silkscreens, ceramics, and sculpture. He died on September 5, 2010, in Auvers-sur-Oise, the same village where Vincent van Gogh spent his final days.
On the Nordic auction market, Corneille appears regularly through Scandinavian houses including Bukowskis Stockholm, Garpenhus Auktioner, and Stockholms Auktionsverk. His auction presence reflects the strong Scandinavian connection to CoBrA, with 125 lots recorded across these houses. Prints and lithographs form the most active segment, though paintings and sculptures also surface. Notable results include an acrylic work fetching over 40,000 SEK and a Pinocchio variation reaching 10,005 EUR, while his decorative works, such as the carpet "Femme a la Fleur," demonstrate the breadth of his collectible output.