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18/6/2007

Corneille

Cobra Museum, Amstelveen

Some of these days

This summer the Cobra Museum celebrates the 85th birthday of Corneille, one of the most sparkling artists of the CoBrA movement.

A special exhibition is being devoted to the comprehensive and versatile oeuvre of this longest surviving member of the 'CoBrA Three', comprising a splendid selection of some forty top works. The exhibition covers the beginning of the early 1940s to the mid-1960s: from his early, explorative figuration to the spontaneity of the CoBrA years (1948-1951) and the optimistically charged, colourful works of the years thereafter.

In a long artistic career Corneille has shown himself, in word and image, to be one of the leading champions of the CoBrA ideals. At the beginning of his career he, Karel Appel and Constant formed a close-knit trio, together founding with Danish and Belgian artists the major international CoBrA group in 1948. Corneille fought fervently against bourgeois small-mindedness and was in favour of experimental renewal. With his paintings, graphic work, poetry, ceramics, travelogues and photographs the artist has become known among a wide public.

Corneille (Leige, 1922) first came into contact with Surrealism and the work of Paul Klee and Miró in Budapest in 1947. This experience was of major importance to his later artistic development, as was his introduction to the work of the Danish painter Carl-Henning Pedersen. Corneille's poetic work of the CoBrA years, partly inspired by children’s drawings, was followed by a period of abstraction. In 1950 he moved to Paris, where French art played a role in his work. Moreover, as an artist he was also a traveller. He explored Africa with its majestic nature and primitive art, followed by the lush flora of South America and the verticality of New York. Absorbed by African art, Corneille returned to figuration in the mid-1960s, painting depictions of fertility symbols in warm tones and heavy outlined.

Corneille is the painter of life in all its differentiation. Within this he strives for order within a formative geometric structure, which is never just rational, but gives the idea of being part of a planetary system. Reality is constantly intruding, yet Corneille’s art always manages to escape it. There is the joy in the movement and mystery of the bird that never flies. In such a painting the desire to make Utopia a reality is achieved.

Photographs and film portraits of Corneille can be seen during the exhibition.

Cobra Museum
Sandbergplein 1 -Amsterdam

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