The painter and graphic artist, born in Hagen in 1912, was one of those artists who decided to make a fresh start after 1945. Initially seeking orientation in Expressionism and the figurative style of New Objectivity in the 1930s, he soon became one of the outstanding figures not only on the German but also on the European art scene. Following abstract tendencies that became clear in France and America, his intention was to paint that sought to overcome the objective, which was manifested in his co-founding of the informal artists' group Junge Westen in 1947.

In the 1950s, Schumacher developed a special form of informal painting that approximated the “material image” in his intensive examination of the inherent value of color matter and its psychological impact. Works were created that lived solely from color, without any constructive framework, with the help of an impasto applied color relief and cracked brush marks making the painting process appear delayed, congealed, and disturbed. The preferred brown-black and bright red colors, combined with a graffiti-like sign language and the tactile surface, make these “crater landscape paintings” appear like old, brittle masonry.

In his late work, the gloomy tone of these mostly large-format pictures brightens and the artist's unwavering concern to deal with the design of life becomes noticeable. The further development of movement, the flow of power, in the unique color and form language gained by Schumacher also meant a return to the figurative for the artist, with graphic references to representational motifs increasingly appearing - mostly in archetypal reduction - such as the ladder, the wheel, the horse or the human figure in his works.

Without revoking the non-representational painting of the decades before and thus the expressive power of abstraction, the artist found his own answers in his late representational work and thus went beyond informal positions. Emil Schumacher died in October 1999 at his home in Ibiza.