A double anniversary
In autumn 2010 the Ernst Barlach Haus is celebrating a double anniversary: in its fiftieth year of existence it pays tribute to Emil Schumacher in the hundredth anniversary year of his birth. Few artists have left such a striking mark on post-war German painting than Emil Schumacher (1912–1999).
His works have become icons of an era that endeavoured to find a new and liberated visual language for existential questions. Schumacher found it: in an intensive involvement with colour as material he created auratic images which always reflect their own process of creation. As a universal mirror of the individual they are a record of hesitation and apprehension, forceful self-assertion and a seismographic sensibility.
The exhibition ‘Colours are a Feast for the Eye’ – a dictum of the artist from the year 1958, quoting a famous sentence by the French painter Eugène Delacroix – concentrates programmatically on Schumacher’s work of the late 1950s and the 1960s. This emphasis highlights a fascinating stage of artistic development – the decade in which Emil Schumacher became what he is: a classic of modernism.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue from StrzeleckiBooks (144 pages with numerous colour plates, German, hardcover).
