(Hagen, Westphalia, 1912–1999 San José, Ibiza)
Untitled (E.S.), 1958, signed, dated Schumacher 58, oil, sand on canvas, 170 x 132 cm, framed, (AR)

We are grateful to Ulrich Schumacher for confirming the authenticity of this work. The work is registered in the Emil Schumacher Foundation, Hagen, under the archive no. 0/4.305.

Provenance:
Private Collection, Geneva
Luca Scacchi Gracco Collection (stamps on the reverse)
Sotheby’s London, 6 December 1990, lot 20
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Milan, Galleria dell’Ariete, 1959

Literature:
Roberto Pasini, L’informale. Stati Uniti, Europa, Italia, CLUEB, Bologna 1995, plate XXXV, p. 431

The position of German Informalism was completed by the participation of artists such as […] Emil Schumacher, whose work displays a dense and anguished materiality, surfaces furrowed by erosion and mysterious signs of decay.
(Roberto Pasini, L’Informale. Stati Uniti, Europa, Italia, Bologna 1995)

Emil Schumacher was born in the Westphalian town of Hagen in 1912 and began a three-year degree at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Dortmund when he was 20 years old. He started working as an independent artist in 1935 and founded the artist and exhibition association “junger westen“ in 1947 together with a few other artists. The style of his work changed drastically in 1950.
He abandoned painting objects and turned towards the expressive power of painting alone. Colour itself gradually became the decisive element of his works. This biographical artistic process happened during a period, which was determined by the French École de Paris, Tachism and American Action Painting. While abstraction itself was typical of this period, it also became a typical aspect of Emil Schumacher‘s personal style.
After exhibiting at the “documenta III“ in Kassel in 1964 he created extremely large works, which manifest an extreme painterly freedom. This phase lasted until the 1980s. Emil Schumacher became internationally known and praised around the middle of the 1950s as one of the most important artists of the Informel. He was awarded numerous international prizes, of which the Guggenheim Award in New York in 1958 was only the beginning. He was appointed professor at the “Hochschule für Bildende Künste“ in Hamburg in the same year, accepted a post as professor in Karlsruhe in 1966 and taught as a guest professor at the university in Minneapolis/USA in 1967 for one year. The “Deutscher Bundestag“ honoured him in 1998 by commissioning a mural for the Reichstag building in Berlin.

Emil Schumacher died in San José on 4 October 1999, one year after the large retrospective exhibition in Munich.