Special collections

Our collection boasts unique heritage pieces and exceptional sources. Discover some hidden treasures and the fascinating stories behind them – all available digitally in our catalog.

Amsab-ISG has built up considerable expertise in digitizing newspapers and archives over the past few years. This section also provides insights into a selection of these sources, which are full-text searchable wherever possible.

Louis Deltour (1927–1998) was a Walloon painter and socially engaged artist who dedicated his life to social and political themes. Driven by a deep connection to working-class backgrounds, he created monumental, figurative art about struggle, solidarity, and everyday life, far removed from the commercial art world. As co-founder of Forces Murales and later Art et travail, he consciously chose public spaces like community centers and schools to make his work accessible to everyone.

View a selection of his impressive work in the Amsab-ISG collection here.

Louis Deltour - Painting of an old woman and a young woman, both picking grapes. 1970

Biography
Paintings
Drawings
Engravings
Carpet designs
Sculptures
From sketch to painting
View the complete Louis Deltour collection in the online catalogue

Biography

Louis Deltour was born on July 23, 1927, in Guignies, a small village near Tournai. His father was a bricklayer, his mother a housewife. At fourteen, he enrolled at the Tournai Academy of Fine Arts. During World War II, he joined Group 60 of the Secret Army, with which he participated in a series of sabotage operations. He also illustrated a clandestine magazine.

After the war, Deltour studied with Charles Counhaye at the Ecole nationale supérieure d'Architecture et des Arts décoratifs de la Cambre in Brussels. There he met Edmond Dubrunfaut and Roger Somville. In 1947, the trio of artists founded the Centre de Rénovation de la Tapisserie de Tournai and the group Forces Murales. Inspired by both Mexican muralists and the age-old art of tapestry, and encouraged by various public commissions, they created monumental works about "the life and work of people, their struggles, their suffering, their joys, their victories, and their hopes."

In the early 1950s, Deltour joined the Communist Party. He was active in the Brussels branch of the youth movement. There, in 1952, he met Jacqueline Brankaer, a Flemish teacher, whom he married and had two sons, André and Philippe.

In 1953, he left the Forces Murales group, but continued to work on themes closely related to those of his former comrades (the Marcinelle mine disaster, construction workers, the peace movement, etc.). In 1961, Deltour became a professor at the Tournai Academy of Fine Arts. From 1973 to 1980, he, along with several former students and his son Philippe, was involved in the collective Art et travail. With Art et travail, he also dedicated himself to exhibiting art in public spaces.

His wife died prematurely in 1981.

True to his commitment, Louis Deltour chose to work in the shadows, far from art galleries and wary of any form of commercialism. He created numerous figurative works on the themes of workers and peasants, daily life, and social struggle. He exhibited only in publicly accessible places: community centers, schools, and so on. This perhaps explains why his work never received the attention it deserved and remained unknown to the general public. Until his death on January 9, 1998, his art remained imbued with a profound humanism.