Emil Schumacher

Schumacher studied free graphic art at the Werkkunstschule Dortmund from 1932 to 1935 in order to become a commercial artist. Until 1939 he worked as a freelance painter without participating in exhibitions. In the following years of the war he was conscripted into service as a technical draughtsman in a Hagen armaments factory until he was able to work as a freelance painter again at the end of the war in 1945. In 1947 he founded the artists’ association “junger westen” in Recklinghausen together with Gustav Depe, Thomas Grochowiak, Ernst Hermanns, Heinrich Siepmann and Hans Werdehausen. His initially representational painting became increasingly abstract in the 1950s, influenced by the École de Paris, Tachism and American Action Painting. Free from the representational and geometric, without fixed principles of composition, it is a matter of dealing with the material, with colour. Colour and lines determine his works. In the late works of the 1990s, figurative reminiscences appear. From 1958 to 1960 Schumacher taught as a professor at the Hochschule für Bildenden Künste in Hamburg, and from 1966 to 1977 he held a professorship at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe. In 1959, 1964 and 1977 his works were presented at the documenta in Kassel. In 1967 Schumacher went to the Minneapolis School of Art for a guest professorship, returning a year later to become a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Since 2009, a selection of his works has been open to the public in the Emil Schumacher Museum in Hagen. Schumacher is one of the most important representatives of German Informel.