Roger Somville (Schaerbeek, 13 November 1923 – Tervuren, 31 March 2014) was a modern Belgian painter. He defended realism against modern abstract art, which he believed de-humanize human beings.
In his book, Peindre, he denounces among other things; "tricks in the shape of art", "empty productions", "triumph of less than nothing", "null simplism", "aesthete bricolage", "conformity of what's never been seen" and (the) "submissiveness of the modern art in a globalized market" ...
Somvile was a member of the Communist Party and accordingly wrote "La Création d’un art public exaltant la vie et le travail des hommes, leurs luttes, leurs souffrances, leurs joies, leurs victoires et leurs espoirs; art à placer à la portée de tous, là où passent et vivent les hommes". ("The Creation of a public art praising men's life and work, their fights, their griefs, their joys, their victories, and their hopes; an art made for everybody to carry it there where men pass and live.")
The entry in the LAROUSSE Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique describes Somville as "A Belgian
Painter of an expressive and monumental style, concerned by the realities of the contemporary world."
Born in Brussels in 1923, Somville lost his father, a worker in marquetry, at an early age.
He and his mother faced a precarious material existence. His uncle, a lithographer and early Marxist, was a source of ideological influence. He took drawing lessons at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (1940–1942), and then went to The Higher National school for Architecture and the Decorative Arts of Brussels, (in the architect atelier Lucien François' atelier). It was here that he would meet the painter Charles Counhaye who was to show him the way to expressive and monumental art (1942–1945).
Somville as a young man was influenced by the rise of fascism, The Spanish Civil War, the workers' movement. He read Marx and Lenin. He admired Bertolt Brecht, Serge Eisenstein, Erwin, Piscator, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Chaplin and Eric von Stroheim.
In 1946, he created the Centre de Rénovation de laTapisserie de Tournai with his friends
Edmond Dubrunfaut and Louis Deltour and also the group Forces murales. In 1951, he founded atelier de la céramiquede Dour with his wife, Simone Tits.
Somville adopted the Aragon thesis, which was that "the central question in art had never been the battle between pure invention, which did not exist, and observation which is indispensable
but rather one of the sense of the œuvre opposed to it futility".
He wrote the manifestos of the Realist Movement in 1958 and 1966 and developed thinking in his two books:
Pour le réalisme, un peintre s’interroge (1970) and
Hop-là les pompiers, les revoilà ! (1975).
He wrote two unpublished works: Notre temps (a mural at the metro station Hankar) and Peinture, novation, idéologie.
His sources are to be found in the work of the great masters and the giants epic paintings, among others Rubens, Goya, Gericault and Picasso (whom he met in 1951). Among his friends were Siqueiros, Guttuso, Pignon, Lorjou and Delvaux.
Mural painting, aimed as it is as the widest possible audience, was a natural choice