Bert Cornelius

For a quarter of a century (1984-2009), Bert Cornelius (1952–2018) produced illustrations for the Groningen university newspaper UKrant. He also produced illustrations for the Het Financieel Dagblad, Het Nieuwsblad, and later Dagblad van het Noorden newspapers, as well as for school textbooks and many magazines.

Clean lines

Bert Cornelius created thousands of illustrations in a characteristic style inspired by his favourite cartoonist Moebius, the pseudonym of French artist Jean Giraud (1938–2012), and by the ‘clean lines’ of Hergé (Tintin).

But Cornelius also developed his own authentic style, nearly always in black and white, partly due to the fact that the UKrant was printed in black and white.

Medicine and art school

By his own account, Bert Cornelius was given ‘informal drawing lessons’ by his father. As a schoolboy, he filled his diary and exercise books with drawings of plane cockpits, knights, and beautiful girls. Beautiful girls, often scantily dressed, became somewhat of a speciality, as apparent from the illustrations in this exhibition. But, for Mussengang, Bert Cornelius also drew women who did not in any way resemble fashion models, as well as men in all shapes and sizes. He knew how the human body worked, in part thanks to his studies in medicine. He worked as a physician until his retirement in 2018 and was awarded a PhD in Medicine in 2013.

In his last years as a student at the University of Groningen, he took an evening course at the Minerva Art Academy. Cornelius created his illustrations in the evenings after work. Especially in the later years of the Mussengang serial, he would first go out to do fieldwork with his Polaroid camera. Many of his illustrations are set at locations that are familiar to Groningen inhabitants. This is a second feature of his illustrations: he was not only a gifted portrayer of people, but also of places in Groningen and the surrounding countryside. His own experience as a student in Groningen helped him to accurately portray the typical atmosphere of a student house.

For the Mussengang illustrations, he based his work for a long time on an existing student house in the Zuiderpark neighbourhood. In this way, his Mussengang illustrations were a feast of recognition for anyone who had studied in Groningen and had experienced the Groningen student life.