Schumacher, Emil

Description:

Hagen, 1912 - San José/Ibiza, 1999
36,5 x 20,5 cm, R.
"G-72/1958", 1958. Mixed media on cardboard. Signed and dated in ink lower right.
The artwork is listed under inventory number 0/1.190 in the inventory register of the Emil Schumacher Foundation, compiled by Dr. Ulrich Schumacher. We thank Mr. Rouven Lotz, Emil Schumacher Museum, for his scholarly advice.
Villa Grisebach, Berlin, auction November 1987.
Galerie Zimmer, Düsseldorf.
Collection Monika and Horst Bülow, Leonberg, acquired there in 1987.
The work "G-72/1958" was created during one of the decisive phases of Emil Schumacher’s artistic development. By the late 1950s, the painter had definitively broken away from representation and developed a pictorial language characterized by gestural freedom, expressive materiality, and an immediate physical presence.
This work on cardboard exemplifies how Schumacher made the material itself the true carrier of expression. Its surface is marked by layers, scratches, and overpainting that lend it an almost relief-like structure. Black-drawn lines traverse the ground, while white concentrations shine out of earthy tones - a play of destruction and reconstruction, of trace and overlay. It is precisely in this raw directness that the power of the work lies: it appears not composed but born of process, the immediate imprint of an artistic impulse.
Works on paper and cardboard such as "G-72/1958" occupy a special position in Schumacher’s oeuvre. They document the freedom of experimentation, the unrestrained testing of material and gesture, and at the same time stand as autonomous, highly expressive works. In their immediacy, they remain authentic testimonies of Art Informel, which in the 1950s became the international expression of a new artistic attitude.
For collectors, works of this kind hold a particular fascination: they show Schumacher at the height of his development into a leading figure of German Informel, whose work received international recognition as early as 1959 at documenta II, just one year after the creation of this piece. Today, his works are represented in major museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Tate, London.
"G-72/1958" is a powerful example of Schumacher’s ability to create painting of elemental force and poetic depth from the simplest of materials - a work of museum quality that enriches any collection of postwar art.