Corneille - L’ oiseau dans la féte - Sold

Year: 1997
Technique: Lithograph
Signed: hand-signed, numbered, and dated with title of work.
Edition: 28/30 (Limited edition)
Image dimensions: 28 x 38 cm (within passe-partout).
Frame dimensions: 45.5 x 51.5 cm. This is a gold-mottled wooden frame. 3.5 cm wide and 2.5 cm high. Condition: Very good. The frame has a few small spots of use (see photos). Ready to hang on the wall; it is a rarely offered colorful work by Corneille given its limited edition of 30.

Corneille.
Corneille was born in Liège, Belgium, the child of Dutch parents. Although largely self-taught, he took art courses at the Amsterdam Rijksacademie between 1940 and 1942. In 1946, he held his first exhibition in Groningen.
Initially strongly influenced by the work of Picasso, he broke away from this in 1948 and joined the Cobra movement; he is a co-founder of it, together with, among others, the Dutch artists 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 (1928–1993) until 1968. The couple married in Amsterdam in 1955 and traveled repeatedly to other parts of the world: North Africa, North America, the Antilles, and South America. These travels largely determine the nature of his work. From 1960 onwards, he returned to figurative art, in which women, birds, flowers, and often figures 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 virtually not 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 September 5, 2010. Corneille was buried in the cemetery of Auvers-sur-Oise, where Vincent van Gogh was also buried in 1890. His work, *Au sein de désert, il ya encore de la place pour les yeux* (1949), fetched 281,000 euros at an auction in Copenhagen (2006). Never before has such a sum been paid for one of his works. Corneille also created life-size sculptures.

His work
Le Bateau de L'espoir was sold in 1993 for 70,000 guilders and is worth many times that amount today. He continued painting until the end of his life. According to his spokesman, Boudewijn Hiltermann, the three art elephants for the Elephant Parade were the last works Corneille completed. The auction of one of these elephants on November 13, 2009, at the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam fetched 42,000 euros. On September 9, 2010, his final artwork, Corneillefant 3, was auctioned in Emmen.


Works in public collections
· Art Museum The Hague
· Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
· Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
• Cultural Heritage Agency
· Cobra Museum of Modern Art Amstelveen
· Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Holland
· Schiedam, Stedelijk Museum, Holland
· Paris, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, France
· Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne, France
· Paris, Fonds National d'art contemporain, France
· Dunkerque, LAAC, France
· Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Belgium
· Ghent, SMAK, Belgium
· Liège, La Boverie, Belgium
· Charleroi, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Belgium
· Arlon, Musée Gaspar-Collection de l'Institut Archéologique du Luxembourg, Belgium
· New York, Brooklyn Museum, United States
· Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, United States
· Indiana, Indianapolis Museum of Art, United States
· Wichita, Wichita Art Museum, United States
· Fort Lauderdale, NSU Art Museum, United States