Corneille artwork • watercolour • drawing • for sale Nuit d'été (Summer night)

Corneille, along with Appel and Constant, was one of the leading figures of the CoBrA group (1948-1951) in the Netherlands. In the nineteen fifties he shared a studio with Appel on the Rue Santeuil in Paris, where he developed a style characterised by an expressive interplay of lines and a well-thought out composition. As a result of several trips to distant countries in 1957 and 1958, for the next couple of years Corneille began painting abstract constructions of cities and agglomerations comprising a whimsical build up of forms and lines. In the nineteen sixties he switched to the exuberantly painted birds and suns for which he became so well-known.