Csornay Boldizsár - Dobos Zsuzsa - Varga Ágota - Zakariás János szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 97. (Budapest, 2002)
The Year 2002
published in Dutch to accompany the exhibition in Amstelveen (Corneille, Het Hongaarse Avontuur 1947, with an essay by Claudia Kussel, Amsterdam 2002), appeared also in Hungarian for the exhibition in Budapest (Corneille, a magyar kaland 1947, Budapest 2002, fig. 70). The rediscovery of the drawings, gouaches, and collages made in Budapest and Szentendre has a major importance in understanding the artist's work. It remains for future research to discover what direct influences formed the way of the young Dutchman just beginning his active artistic career or what his Hungarian colleagues, receptive to all, could have drawn from meeting him. It seems certain, however, that after the divergent exploratory attempts of the previous period, more and more marked features appeared in 1947 in Corneille's works. It was the time when, leaving behind the spell of Matisse and Cubism and freeing his spontaneous gestures, the characteristic features of the later period began to take shape: imagination exploding with expressive suggestivity and held together by a bold constructive system. We are witnesses to a direct and exceptional meeting of Hungarian and international art, when the influence is demonstrably directed "outwards". The experience of these four months had an influence on the entire movement through Corneille. The exhibition of the Museum of Fine Arts, besides making Corneille's works available for the Hungarian public, has cast light on the fact that his stay of 1947 in Hungary brought a turn whose results were permanently integrated into the oeuvre of the artist. The curator of the exhibition —organized jointly with the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen and the Stichting Europeer —was Ferenc Tóth, who also selected the approximately sixty works arriving in Budapest. It is the representation of the early years of the artist that received the greatest emphasis: nearly half of the exhibited works date from the time spent in Budapest and Szentendre. Since we wished to present a comprehensive idea of Corneille's prolific and diverse activity stretching over half a century, we highlighted the Cobra period (1948-1951), which marks the height of the artist's career, and complemented it with the most recent works characterized by stylistic renewal, a richness of colour, and a great variety of forms. A special feature of the show was the colourful and formally variegated sculptural production of the latest years. The works of the early period came to Budapest from the Elisabeth den Bieman de Haas Gallery of Amsterdam, while the later ones were loaned by the Cobra Museum and private collections abroad. The impressive catalogue, printed in colour, presents essays by Claudia Kussel, who studied Corneille's Budapest period, and Willemijn Stokvis, the internationally acknowledged monographer of the artist and the COBRA group. The realization of the exhibition and the catalogue was made possible through the support of the Mondriaan Stichting of Amsterdam. F. T. Translated by D. S.
