Corneille

GUILLAUME CORNELIS “CORNEILLE” VAN BEVERLOO (Belgium, 1922 – France, 2010).
“Noah’s Ark.”
Polychrome wood sculpture.
Work featured on the cover of the catalog: “Corneille, Silkeborg, Galerie Moderne, 1999. 87 pp., 1999.
Signed.
Measurements: 145 x 255 x 45 cm.

This extraordinary monumental sculpture encapsulates Corneille’s creative universe like few others, making it one of the most representative compositions of his unmistakable style. The ship, teeming with a multitude of brightly colored birds, serves as a metaphor for coexistence among species, fertility, the journey, and the renewal of life—concepts that run through the artist’s entire body of work. Crafted from polychrome wood, the piece translates into three dimensions the pictorial language that made Corneille famous. The surfaces are covered in intense flat colors, delineated by thick black outlines that structure the composition and enhance its expressive power. This aesthetic, with its spontaneous appearance and affinities with primitive and folk art, has its roots in the gestural freedom championed by the CoBrA group, of which Corneille was a founding member alongside Karel Appel, Asger Jorn, and Constant. Birds are one of the most recurring motifs in his iconography. Far from a naturalistic representation, they appear transformed into imaginary creatures that symbolize freedom, vital energy, and the bond between humans and nature. It is worth noting that the success of this composition led the artist to develop a series of small-scale polychrome wooden sculptures, produced in a limited edition, based on this design.

Better known by his pseudonym Corneille, Guillaume Cornelis van Beverloo was a Belgian painter and printmaker of Dutch descent. He began studying art in 1940 in Amsterdam, where he met painters such as Constant and Karel Appel. Interested in the work of Pignon, Matisse, and Picasso, he began exhibiting in 1946. He visited Hungary shortly thereafter and there discovered Surrealism, drawing inspiration from the paintings of Klee and Miró. Along with Appel, Constant, and others, Corneille was a member of the Dutch “Experimentale Group,” contributed to the magazine “Reflex,” and was part of the CoBrA movement (1948–1951). After the dissolution of the CoBrA movement, he moved to Paris. Two years later, in 1953, he began creating etchings, and the following year, ceramic works. The influence of his collection of African art, acquired during a trip to North Africa in 1949, is evident in the evolution of his work from the late 1950s onward, as he gradually moved away from abstract landscape painting to develop an imaginative style featuring bird’s-eye-view landscapes, exotic animals, and highly stylized figures. Corneille’s work is currently represented at MoMA in New York, the Slovak National Gallery, the Museum of Dordrecht, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and others.