Born in Hagen, Westphalia, in 1912, Emil Schumacher began a three-year course of study at the School of Applied Arts in Dortmund at the age of 20. He has been working as a freelance painter since 1935. In 1947, Schumacher founded the artists' and exhibition association "junger westen" (young west) with several fellow painters. From 1950 onwards, Schumacher's work underwent a radical change. He abandoned the object as a pictorial motif and opted for the expressiveness of painting itself. Color increasingly became a pictorial factor in its own right. This biographical and artistic process took place against the backdrop of a contemporary style influenced by the French École de Paris, Tachism, and American Action Painting. While abstraction was a sign of the times, for Schumacher it also became a characteristic of his personal style.

While the works of the first half of the 1950s are still clearly influenced by the gestural means of expression of Tachism, towards the end of the decade Schumacher finds his own unique abstract visual language, which aims at a form that is filled with expression but not fragmented and torn apart by the need for expression. The dualism of ground and painterly form is increasingly abolished, and the compositional structure is pushed into the background in favor of a homogeneous layer of color. Schumacher's canvases gain plasticity. As the present work clearly shows, the picture is no longer understood in the Renaissance sense as a window into a fantasized reality; instead, the canvas becomes a carrier of materiality.

Since participating in documenta III in Kassel in 1964, he has been creating extremely large-format paintings until the 1980s, in which an extraordinary painterly freedom manifests itself. From the mid-1950s onwards, he enjoyed high international recognition as one of the most important representatives of Informel. Schumacher's work was honored with numerous international awards, starting with the Guggenheim Award in New York in 1958. In 1998, the Bundestag honored him with a commission for a mural in the Reichstag building in Berlin. One year after the major retrospective in Munich, Emil Schumacher died on October 4, 1999, in San José. [JS].