Louis Deltour

Louis Deltour set up the artists' collective Forces Murales together with his companions Dubrunfaut and Somville, in 1947. 

They wrote a manifesto that expressed their strong commitment to the major social and political issues of their time. The collective used the creation of "a public art that glorifies the life and work of the people, their struggle, their suffering, their joy, their victories and their hope".

Deltour left Forces Murales in 1953 and six years later the collective would be completely defunct. The three founders each went their separate ways. 

Dubrunfaut and Somville gained international fame. Deltour, however, remained an almost unknown artist. Not because of a lack of talent, but because money and fame did not interest him. He preferred to stay in his rural homeland, where he consistently worked on an oeuvre portraying the working class. An oeuvre with which he wanted to mobilize that working class to break the prevailing bourgeois thinking and to strive for a different society.

Louis Deltour's son

Google and Wikipedia have little or nothing to say about him; Louis Deltour undoubtedly couldn't have cared less. He felt best in his somewhat remote workshop. He found no connection with modern movements and opposed the grandeur of gaudy new collectives. 

For Deltour, art had to be rooted in the daily life of the simple people around him. That is why he mainly portrayed the working man: the miner, the stonemason, the bricklayer, farmer and peasant woman. He also depicted the workers' struggle in a simple but penetrating way. Deltour was a realistic artist with a mission: to form the working man in the spirit of socialism.