Corneille - lithograph 260/300 - signed r.o. - 2001

Corneille was born in Liège, Belgium, to Dutch parents[1]. Although largely self-taught, he attended art courses at the Amsterdam Rijksacademie between 1940 and 1942. In 1946 he held his first exhibition in Groningen.

Initially strongly influenced by Picasso's work, he broke away from it in 1948 and joined the Cobra movement, of which he was a co-founder, together with, among others, the Dutch Karel Appel, Jan Nieuwenhuijs, his brother Constant Nieuwenhuijs and the Belgians Christian Dotremont and Joseph Noiret.
In 1950 he moved from Amsterdam to Paris where he lived with the photographer Henny Riemens[2] (1928-1993) until 1968. The couple married in Amsterdam in 1955 and travelled several times to other parts of the world: North Africa, North America, the Antilles and South America. These journeys largely determine the nature of his work. From 1960 onwards he fell back on figurative art, in which women, birds, flowers and often characters belong to his artistic vocabulary.
He himself claimed that painting is not a hobby or a job, but rather a calling. In recent years, Corneille had his studio in Paris. Visitors were hardly tolerated by the artist. Corneille lived a secluded life in the Maison du Cedres in the French department of Val-d'Oise. He died on 5 September 2010. Corneille was buried in the cemetery in Auvers-sur-Oise, where Vincent van Gogh was also buried in 1890.