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| Corneille |
The Dutch painter and printmaker Corneille, who has died aged 88, was a founder member of the European expressionist movement Cobra. For the three years from 1948, before Cobra disintegrated under the force of its own contradictions, Corneille took part in a display of artistic pyrotechnics which he and his comrades in art hoped would set the world ablaze.
In a sense it did, since for the first 18 months Cobra comprised the most attention-grabbing collection of expressionist painters in the world. At that point, Jackson Pollock was finding his feet and looking for the audience that arrived in a rush with the publication in August 1949 of the issue of Life magazine with the famous spreads of Hans Namuth's photographs showing Pollock at work.
As a Dutchman, Corneille belonged to the letter "a" of Cobra, an acronym for Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam: Asger Jorn was Danish; Constant, Corneille and Karel Appel were the most prominent of the Dutch contingent; Christian Dotremont and Pierre Alechinsky were Belgian. Constant (Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys, as he preferred not to be known) was a communist who hated Soviet socialist realism. The group followed his lead in proposing to be a red internationale, creating art for the people, though it was not until the brightly hedonistic, uncomplicated primary colours of Corneille's old age that he himself became a truly popular artist. But to start with, there was the revolution. "We looked on art as an invincible weapon in the fight for freedom," Constant said. "We were poor but enthusiastic, and we didn't care if the public laughed at us. That sort of attitude arises only at certain rare moments."
Paris was the city conspicuous by its absence from Cobra, but it was to Paris that Corneille travelled with Appel in 1948 and where, in the Notre Dame cafe, the group signed a manifesto denouncing the surrealists, though annexing some of their methods. They looked to children's art, to the art created in psychiatric hospitals, to folk art and folklore, and, the century's common denominator, "primitive" art. From this melange they created art of brilliant colour and expressiveness, only semi-abstract.
Corneille was born Cornelis Guillaume van Beverloo in Liège, Belgium, to Dutch parents who moved back to the Netherlands when their son was 12. From 1940 to 1943, he took drawing lessons at the Amsterdam Rijksakademie, where he formed a friendship with Appel which lasted until Appel died in 2006. Corneille taught himself painting and experimental verse, and in 1950, when he settled in Paris for life, chose Corneille as his nom de guerre and learned printmaking in the Paris atelier of Stanley William Hayter. Lithography was a useful discipline for reining him in. In black and white, he created dark images that at their best could look like a surreal interpretation of Goya.
Incongruously enough, it was during a four-month stay in Budapest that he discovered Paul Klee and Joan Miró in reproduction while he was browsing in a bookshop. In the Cobra years, he was to mine them extensively.
Possibly out of relief that Corneille and his Dutch allies were at last producing art to be proud of, Willem Sandberg, the director of the Stedelijk Museum, brought Cobra to Amsterdam for a huge exhibition in 1949. The press was outraged. The daily paper Het Vrije Volk headlined its report "Botch, blotch, and splotch" and fistfights broke out in the audience during a modernist poetry reading (Corneille was one of the Cobra poets), almost like the glory days of Dada after the end of the first world war.
In 1951 Liège followed suit with a Cobra retrospective, though minus the fisticuffs. Likewise the break-up of Cobra later that year; no punch-up, just natural attrition. Artists and groups do not sit easily together, except in the pages of art history.
Corneille, meanwhile, had visited Tunis in 1948 and experienced the kind of north African epiphany that had affected other artists so deeply, from Delacroix to Renoir and Matisse. For a time, these impressions embedded themselves deep in his memory, but in the late 1960s they emerged with a cast of exotic animals and prettified Gauguin nudes as part of his repertory, playing against a backdrop of wide desert spaces.
Corneille carried on painting until the end of his life, but the later work is a problem. If the test is, "would it look good hanging on a wall at home?", the answer is yes. Yet there is a weightlessness that suggests a talent running on autopilot. Still, the paintings and graphics sold well, and if his international reputation dimmed, at home he was a hero. In 2007 he travelled to the Netherlands for the opening of a Cobra museum, devoted to keeping the torch burning.
Corneille is survived by his second wife, Natacha, a Russian ballet dancer, and their son, Dimitri.
