Emil Schumacher

1912, Hagen1999, Ibiza

The painter and graphic artist Emil Schumacher is one of the main figures of German Informel. After his education as an applied artist at the Kunstgewerbeschule Dortmund (1932-35), he started his carrier as a visual artist. In 1947 he founded the artists' association "junger westen" with fellow painters including Gustav Deppe, Ernst Hermanns, and Heinrich Siepmann. Only three years after this momentous merger, the aim of which was to reactivate modern art after the National Socialist dictatorship, Schumacher's work underwent a major stylistic upheaval: Influenced by the artistic tendencies of the post-war period in France and the USA, such as Tachism and Action Painting, Schumacher embraced the change to abstract painting, in which color emancipated itself as the main object of painting. As a representative of Informel, Schumacher no longer strives for an "(...) approach to a given or imagined idea in the picture (...) "1), but rather for the genesis and development of such an idea during the spontaneous, constantly reflected painting process.

Kraft Bretschneider, "Das Materialbild und Emil Schumacher", in: Galerie von Braunbehrens (ed.): "Emil Schumacher und das Materialbild", exhibition catalogue, Munich 1998, p. 7.

Selected Artworks
Selected Exhibitions
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