Guillaume Corneille

From Grove Art Online: Dutch painter, printmaker, ceramicist and writer. He studied at the Amsterdam Rijksakademie from 1940 to 1943 but taught himself to paint. His early work was naturalistic, but he began to treat his forms more schematically ca. 1945. In 1947 Corneille spent four months in Hungary. He discovered Surrealism when browsing in a small bookshop in Budapest. Corneille was one of the founders in Amsterdam of De Experimentele Groep in Holland in the summer of 1948; in November in Paris, he was a co-founder of the international Cobra movement. He was experimenting with many styles as late as 1947, but by 1948 he had found his own style. This was characterized by strong lines and the interplay of colours, and the fantastic being, inspired by children's drawings. In 1953 Corneille learnt printmaking techniques in the Paris studio of the graphic artist Stanley William Hayter. In 1954 and 1955 he spent time working in ceramics in the Mazzotti factory in Albisol, Italy. In the second half of the 1960s, his forms and colours became more powerful. See file for full citation.