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."

He admired Bertolt Brecht, Serge Eisenstein, Erwin, Piscator, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Chaplin and Eric von Stroheim.

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".

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).

ft), is doubtless the most well-known, to mural, which include the extraordinary work Notre temps (600m2/ 6,500 sq.

His desire to create found expression in paintings which can be by turn wildly violent or strict and austere.

They can be part of the collective epic: these are his compositions which attempt to tackle world events: Alternatively, his energy expressed in caustic drawings: "La diarrhée intellectuelle", Les vernissages.

Forms adapt themselves to the expression of a convictions, the pulsating, a character; they burst their limits, change their shape.

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.