Roger Somville (Schaerbeek, 13 November 1923) is a modern Belgian painter. He defends realism against modern abstract art, which he believes de-humanize human beings.
In his book, Peindre, he denounces "tricks in the shape of art", "empty productions", "triumph of less than nothing", "null simplism", "aesthete bricolage", "conformity of what's never been seen", "submissiveness of the modern art in a globalized market" ...
He was a member of the Communist Party, and he 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."
Another description possible might be : "Brussels French speaking artist, inspired by the French-Flemish pictural tradition; one for the foremost national, or international, exponents of the realist position and movement; amongst the best-known contemporary artist…”.
And, paradoxically, one of the most contested, often by those who know his work least. For Roger Somville offers a double challenge; to the social establishment, in his political ideas and to the artistic equivalent, in his conception of art. A heavy load to carry for one man...
However Somville’s position remains steadfastly consistent, rooted as it is in his genuine opinions.
=Background==D 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 has a fundamentally generous nature: as a young man he became involved in and was Intensely influenced by the great social movements and conflicts of his day: the rise of fascism, The Spanish Civil War, the workers’ movement. He read Marx and Lénine. He admired Bertolt Brecht, Serge Eisenstein, Erwin, Piscator, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Chaplin, Eric von Stroheim. His sensibility would lead him to take the part of the underprivileged and those least able to defend themselves: a stand had to be taken against man’s exploitation of man and a painter’s weapon in the revolutionary cause are his paints and brushes.
Contents |
The essential aim is to transpose the phenomena of social reality into the pictural medium, and for this transposition to be comprehensible to the greatest number. It is therefore necessary to use traditional terms.
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:
He wrote two unpublished works: Notre temps (a mural at the metro station Hankar) and Peinture, novation, idéologie.
Now, this was at a time when abstraction and avant-garde experimental art were at their fashionable and market high. Somville, never one to be found on the sidelines, was in the thick of the opposition.
His sources are to be found in the work of the great masters and the giants epic painting: Rubens, Goya, Géricault, Picasso (he met in 1951). His friends were to be Siqueiros, Guttuso, Pignon, Lorjou, Delvaux.
Mural painting, aimed as it is as the widest possible audience, was a natural choice for Somville to make. His work was to range from tapestry, of which Le triomphe de la paix (80m2/ 861 sq. ft), is doubtless the most well-known, to mural, which include the extraordinary work Notre temps (600m2/ 6,500 sq. ft.) at the Hankar metro, and the mural at the University of Louvain la Neuve of the theme qu’est-ce qu’un intellectuel?,(410m2/4/1,330 ft), which he realized with the Collectif d’art public which he founded in 1980. His desire to create finds expression in paintings which can be by turn wildly violent or strict and austere. In his drawings and etchings-both techniques which he uses with masterly strength and charm – he can be satirical and ironic.
Somville’s political position is the result of his personal sensibility. Generosity, love of life, happiness and love all drive him to defend these human values by a political choice. Thus happiness, the implied other face to the coin, is represented in his work and as the result, his themes alternate as well.
They can be part of the collective epic: these are the great composition which tackle world events:
Alternatively, his energy expressed in caustic drawings: «La diarrhée intellectuelle», Les vernissages.
Other themes are intimate in tone and celebrate Woman, Hommage à Rubens, Les baigneuses, Les nus, Le modèle et son peintre are admirable portraits of his wife Simone.
Somville’s work is rooted in a refusal of what he considers to be futile aestheteism. However, his work is not therefore naturalist. Rather than copy reality, he takes it as his source, reconstituting it and transforming it in new, pictural terms. Forms adapt themselves to the expression of a convictions, the pulsating, a character; they burst their limits, change their shape. The explosion of colours serves a desire to express the pulsating of an inner world, over and above the message. They thunder out, sometimes on the verge of the deliberate vulgarity, or, on the contrary are Gaiety and passionate love of live itself.
This is a long way from the anecdote or the tour de force. As Emile Langui says, "We are in the presence of a painter, in the absolute sens of the word."
His work as a painter, théoretician, lecturer and activist and his efforts for peace (he represents Belgium on the World Peace Council) are completed by his teaching life. At the Academy of Watermael-Boitsfort, which has become renowned under his direction, he has trained numerous artists, independent of any artistic dogmatism. He directed the school from 1947 to 1986.
Somville’s painting is known beyond the confines of a small coterie; retrospectives have been devoted to his work in Bruxelles, Paris, Moscow, Cologne, Sofia, Sofia, Mexico, Berlin, Saint-Denis, Bobigny, Liège, Budapest, La Havane, etc.…
Among the collective exhibitions in which Somville’s work has appeared are the Mostra Internationale di Bianco e Nero at Lugano (1960), the Biennale Internationale d’art at Venice (1962), the Biennale Internationale de la tapisserie at Lausanne (1962 and 1965), figuration et défiguration, at the Hedendaagse Kunst Museum in Ghent (1964), the Salon de mai, in Paris (1977), L’art belge depuis (1945), at the Musée des Beaux-Arts André Malraux, Le Havre (1982), then Salon International d’art, at Basle (1985), and other exhibitions including Amsterdam, Utrecht, Antwerp, Ostend, Ljubljana, Frechen, Rijeka, Heidelberg, Venise, and Paris.
His work is to be found in numerous museums in Belgium (the Moderne Art Museum in Brussels), and abroad (Mexico, Dresde, Faenza, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, Sofia, Paris and Lund). Among the various important prizes he has been awarded is the “Prix de le Critique” with Hans Bellmer, (1968–69).
Here then he stands : an outsize personality of prolific gifts and abundant creative force, with an almost prophetic voice. For the evolution of contemporary art seems to be on of reconciliation with reality. Many of Somville’s critics have already revised their opinion of his work ; many others will have to undergo this paintful operation. For today the artist compels our recognition, and his work, our admiration.