Emil Schumacher, 1981. Photo: © Ralf Cohen, Karlsruhe/Emil-Schumacher-Stiftung, Hagen 2012
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Emil Schumacher, Für Berlin, 1957. Deutsche Bank Collection. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012/Emil Schumacher
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Pierre Soulages, Peinture 89 x 130 cm, 7 julliet 1957-1958, 1957/58. Sprengel Museum Hannover. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012/Pierre Soulages
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A painting with a history: Emil Schumacher created For Berlin
for the 7th exhibition of the Association of German Artists, which took
place in 1958, when the city was still divided. One year later, the
painting was chosen for documenta II in Kassel. In 1964, For Berlin represented the resurgent West German art scene in the show German Painting Today at the Museum Boymans in Rotterdam. Additional exhibitions followed, for instance at the Frankfurt Städel. In 1981 the painting was purchased for the Deutsche Bank Collection and remained on view in the Deutsche Bank Towers in Frankfurt until the Head Office was modernized. Now, For Berlin is part of the exhibition Painting is Enhanced Living at the Emil Schumacher Museum
in Hagen. To commemorate the artist’s 100th birthday, the show presents
Schumacher’s work in an international context, opening up a magnificent
panorama of expressive painting from the decades following the Second
World War. These are paintings that resist established forms or
systems, in which the essential thing is the expression of individual
personality. Termed “Informel,” “Tachism,” and “Abstract
Expressionism,” this radically renewed, dynamic painting created an
uproar in Europe and America.
Three years after its opening, the Emil Schumacher Museum presents Painting is Enhanced Living,
its most extensive exhibition project to date. It shows Schumacher in
dialogue with his greatest contemporaries—important Europeans such as Pierre Soulages, Wols, Lucio Fontana, and Antoni Tàpies, as well as the protagonists of the American Abstract Expressionism movement, such as Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline.
In precise juxtapositions, the approximately 60 works from the time
between 1950 and 1980, for the most part large in scale, convey a
painterly energy that has lost nothing of its effect. Emil Schumacher’s
works evoke associations to geographic structures and eroded surfaces.
Pastose paints, scratches and engravings, and scribbled symbols cover
the canvas like so many traces of time and lived life. In 1960,
Schumacher described his artistic approach as follows: „My
painting is nothing but a form of enhanced living.“
“Painting is Enhanced Living”
August 29, 2012 – January 20, 2013
Emil Schumacher Museum, Hagen
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