Roger Somville
| Roger Somville | |
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Roger Somville
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| Born |
13 November 1923 Brussels, Belgium |
| Died | 31 March 2014 (aged 90) Tervuren], Belgium |
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 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 and 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.
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