Corneille - lithograph 82/200 - signed lower right and '89 (very large)

Corneille was born in Liège, Belgium, to Dutch parents.[1] Although largely self-taught, he attended art courses at the Amsterdam State Academy 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 Dutchmen 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 photographer Henny Riemens[2] (1928-1993) until 1968. The couple married in Amsterdam in 1955 and traveled several times to other parts of the world: North Africa, North America, the Antilles, and South America. These journeys largely determined the nature of his work. From 1960 onward, he returned to figurative art, in which women, birds, flowers, and often characters form part of his artistic vocabulary.
He himself claimed that painting was neither a hobby nor a job, but rather a calling. In recent years, Corneille had his studio in Paris. Visitors were practically not tolerated by the artist. Corneille lived a secluded life at the Maison du Cedres in the French department of Val-d'Oise. He died on September 5, 2010. Corneille was buried in the cemetery in Auvers-sur-Oise, where Vincent van Gogh was also buried in 1890.