Emil Schumacher decisively continued the development of non-objective painting in Germany after the Second World War. As early as the 1950s, when Schumacher embarked on the path to abstraction, a characteristic basic motif of his understanding of art emerged, namely the interlocking of graphic gesture and painterly texture.
From the very beginning, Schumacher demonstrated a boundless attraction to matter as well as to materials. Already at the beginning of the 1950s, the painter had detached himself from the object as a pictorial motif and concentrated on the expressiveness of the pictorial medium of color, which in the course of the advancing decades led him to his free, generous painting in extremely large formats. In his search for new kinds of pictorial means and materials, he created his first "tactile objects" as early as the mid-1950s, using bendable and malleable materials such as papier-mâché or wire. In this way, Schumacher was able to live out his love of experimentation and familiarize himself with the expressive possibilities of a wide variety of materials. His preferred means, however, will remain throughout his life the natural material of painting, the paint.
An important feature in Schumacher's work, in addition to the sensual handling of materials, is the enormous intensity, which avoids everything casual and anecdotal and becomes increasingly dense and insistent in color and form. Schumacher aims at an absolute that cannot be grasped through representational depiction. Regardless of his abstract paintings, Schumacher repeatedly referred to his connection to nature: "Everything that is has the form appropriate to it or strives to take on form: the island formations after the flood, the snow residue after the melt, the slag after the fire. The form that has life as its premise - the form that contains life - is formless and yet form." (Emil Schumacher)
Only a year after the major retrospective in Munich, the painter died in San José in 1999. The museum in Hagen, which was opened in the same year on the initiative of his son Ulrich, pays tribute to the artist with over 500 works from all his creative phases.