Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming Emil Schumacher Catalogue Raisonné being prepared by Dr Ulrich Schumacher.
Like the taschist work of Tàpies and Burri, Emil Schumacher's art is a form of "pure" painting that is based less on any preconceived ideology or system of thought and more on an intuitive and interactive search for new "truths" and "beauty" inherent within the substance of the world around us. Inspired to some extent by the stylistic developments of Art Informel and Art Brut and more profoundly, perhaps, by the prevailing mood of Existential thought that pervaded much contemporary art and culture at the end of the Second World War, Schumacher sought an art free from what he saw as the corrupting influences of thought, style and mannerism. "True beauty," he maintained, "results from the Great Action and from a material without any intrinsic aesthetic pretensions. Painting means transforming material into another state.
"In 1951, I started experimenting with the material structure of painting," he wrote, "colour as substance, as matter, as something tangible started to interest me." Right up to the present day, Schumacher's works are a strikingly adventurous investigation into the material qualities of what it is that constitutes a painting. Using his intense emotional response to colour as his key, the form of Schumacher's paintings are arrived at by a purely intuitive and instinctive adoption of the inherent quality of the material and colour of the paint itself. Trying to avoid all "intellectual supervision", Schumacher says that his aim is to "get into the depths, down through the material".
"I approach the work directly and so, I always meet up with materials. Often I leave them in charge for I have learned that they are wiser than all calculations. Craft, technique and excitement are all the same. Colours appropriate forms and signs demand colours. As I allow myself to be carried away I win my painting."
Taras Bulba comes from the period in the late fifties when Schumacher's palette had been refined to the point where he was using mainly his two favourite colours, black and yellow. Towards the end of the 1950s and at the end of the 1960s, this unconscious process of refining would result in a series of near monochrome paintings. Often, however, as in this picture, despite Schumacher's attempts to remove himself from the process of picture-making and to let the material speak for itself, there is a vigorous energy and life to his pictures that though expressed through the material can only have originated in the artist's unconscious. In this way, therefore, Schumacher's paintings belong to a world that hovers between the feeling and reason, between the artist and the material:
"When I paint I am always feverishly tense as if in an act of volition, suspended between feeling and reason. The image I paint, I extract from nature without tying myself to it. Nature is merely a point of departure that enables me to render visibly what is invisibly remote. I advance relatively without knowing where in particular it leads to. It is only the work as a whole that I grasp at all times during the process. In this manner I paint a form while adding a line. Movements are balanced by counter movements. Here I may erase, there I may allow the canvas to show through, or produce a passage of high impasto according to what I feel or think without, however, being able to explain why. I do not follow a scheme when I paint. Everything is acceptable as long as it produces the desired results. If a method begins to crystallize it is best to stop, for with it comes routine and boredom...".
Like the taschist work of Tàpies and Burri, Emil Schumacher's art is a form of "pure" painting that is based less on any preconceived ideology or system of thought and more on an intuitive and interactive search for new "truths" and "beauty" inherent within the substance of the world around us. Inspired to some extent by the stylistic developments of Art Informel and Art Brut and more profoundly, perhaps, by the prevailing mood of Existential thought that pervaded much contemporary art and culture at the end of the Second World War, Schumacher sought an art free from what he saw as the corrupting influences of thought, style and mannerism. "True beauty," he maintained, "results from the Great Action and from a material without any intrinsic aesthetic pretensions. Painting means transforming material into another state.
"In 1951, I started experimenting with the material structure of painting," he wrote, "colour as substance, as matter, as something tangible started to interest me." Right up to the present day, Schumacher's works are a strikingly adventurous investigation into the material qualities of what it is that constitutes a painting. Using his intense emotional response to colour as his key, the form of Schumacher's paintings are arrived at by a purely intuitive and instinctive adoption of the inherent quality of the material and colour of the paint itself. Trying to avoid all "intellectual supervision", Schumacher says that his aim is to "get into the depths, down through the material".
"I approach the work directly and so, I always meet up with materials. Often I leave them in charge for I have learned that they are wiser than all calculations. Craft, technique and excitement are all the same. Colours appropriate forms and signs demand colours. As I allow myself to be carried away I win my painting."
Taras Bulba comes from the period in the late fifties when Schumacher's palette had been refined to the point where he was using mainly his two favourite colours, black and yellow. Towards the end of the 1950s and at the end of the 1960s, this unconscious process of refining would result in a series of near monochrome paintings. Often, however, as in this picture, despite Schumacher's attempts to remove himself from the process of picture-making and to let the material speak for itself, there is a vigorous energy and life to his pictures that though expressed through the material can only have originated in the artist's unconscious. In this way, therefore, Schumacher's paintings belong to a world that hovers between the feeling and reason, between the artist and the material:
"When I paint I am always feverishly tense as if in an act of volition, suspended between feeling and reason. The image I paint, I extract from nature without tying myself to it. Nature is merely a point of departure that enables me to render visibly what is invisibly remote. I advance relatively without knowing where in particular it leads to. It is only the work as a whole that I grasp at all times during the process. In this manner I paint a form while adding a line. Movements are balanced by counter movements. Here I may erase, there I may allow the canvas to show through, or produce a passage of high impasto according to what I feel or think without, however, being able to explain why. I do not follow a scheme when I paint. Everything is acceptable as long as it produces the desired results. If a method begins to crystallize it is best to stop, for with it comes routine and boredom...".