When we think of the brave souls who put their lives on the line during World War Two to resist German occupation, an artist isn’t the first person who comes to mind.
Yet, in 1940s Amsterdam, the artists’ resistance (Kunstenaarsverzet), a loose network of painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, designers and photographers, played an important role in that effort.
It began as a protest against the Kultuurkamer (Chamber of Culture) set up by the Nazis in 1941 and 1942. Artists had to register with it to exhibit, publish or perform, and Jewish artists were excluded.
Many artists, on principle, refused to join and the resistance grew from there. One of their members was a young photographer called Violette Cornelius.
Among other things, she helped make forged identity documents. Riskily, she also photographed the resistance work itself, and this rare visual record is today listed in UNESCO Nederland’s Memory of the World register.
After the war, Cornelius became one of the first generation of women to work as professional photographers in the Netherlands, documenting architecture, refugees and industry. She also travelled the globe, photographing life in India, Peru, Ethiopia and beyond.
Yet much of that work stayed hidden for decades – and in her lifetime, she failed to receive the recognition given to her male peers. Now a major exhibition titled Violette Cornelius Rediscovered at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam aims to put that right.
From Bauhaus to the darkroom
Cornelius was born in 1919 in Batavia, now Jakarta, Indonesia, and grew up between cultures. She trained at the Nieuwe Kunstschool in Amsterdam, where she was introduced to the ideas of the Bauhaus, a revolutionary school of German art, design and architecture that still influences creatives today.
One of the pictures in the show is a student assignment from 1939: a single egg on a white plate, a Modernist study in light and shadow.
A global outlook and a love of travel drove her throughout her career. In 1956, she and photographer Ata Kandó documented Hungarians displaced by the Soviet invasion. In 1964, she joined architect Herman Haan on an expedition to the Tellem caves in Mali.
It marked the start of a series of international reportages in countries including Iraq, India, Yemen, Ethiopia and Peru, documenting how rapid urbanisation was changing people’s lives.
She often lived among her subjects for long periods, which gave the work an intimate, personal feel. Shooting on a Leica, she gradually started working more and more in color. The pictures range from two young sisters sitting stiffly in their best white dresses in a Lima slum, to a pair of women in India balancing huge bundles on their heads.
Many of her pictures, however, remained unseen for decades. After Cornelius died in 1998, parts of her archive went to the Nederlands Fotomuseum. Then, in 2003, her son gave the museum several suitcases holding thousands of negatives, slides, contact prints and documents, including travel work that nobody at the museum knew existed.
A later donation of five more suitcases brought another surprise: a collection of unique vintage prints, book dummies, notes and books. Together, they unlocked a body of work nobody had seen for decades.
“We were astounded at the scale and quality of the work we encountered, work for which no place had yet been reserved in the canon of Dutch photography,” says curator Loes van Harrevelt of the Nederlands Fotomuseum.
The exhibition brings together vintage prints, archive material, new prints and loans from a range of collections, and coincides with the publication of the first monograph on Cornelius. Once hidden away in suitcases, her work is finally out in the open, where it belongs.
Violette Cornelius Rediscovered is at the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, from November 20 to February 28, 2027.
