Emil Schumacher
Talmon, 1981

Artist
Emil Schumacher

Title
Talmon

Year of creation
1981

Technique and dimensions
oil on wood, 124.5 x 170 cm

Year of acquisition
1985

Referenced bottom right: 81 Schumacher

Emil Schumacher developed his “non-representational” pictures under the influence of Wols entirely from the depths of archaic color, the “primal mud” of painting, “it is a descent into the deep layer of artistic means a zone that lies 'underground', so to speak.” (Juliane Roh). Talmon, a picture painted in a rising and falling cadmium red, an eruptive color body landscape that grows high to the horizon and spreads out in all directions.

Since the end of the 1960s, the painter's rugged wooden panels, vehemently worked, served as a resilient image base for ever new imaginations that were sparked by the corpus of the landscape in many countries. In a spontaneous, powerful gesture, the robust red is framed by torn tar black; at the upper edge of the picture, the pasty white is lost in the emptiness and nothingness.

Traces of a violent painting process with scratched lines and blotchy dots, which form pulsating islands, like burn marks and wound marks, an earthy color body of injury, which stretches and stretches widely in red, filled with an inner glow. In this seemingly volcanic landscape, the colors are filled with sand and solidified into a cracked, palpable mass.

The title of the picture “Talmon” sounds enigmatic - one of the many fantasy titles that Emil Schumacher “searched for based on the mood of the picture” and transferred it associatively to this incomparable “elephant skin of the world” (Werner Spies) in his painting.

Talmon and Elam I are not financed by membership fees; they were purchased with the help of Deutsche Bank and other sponsors. Both paintings, which complement each other beautifully in color and format as well as in their artistic gesture, represent the painter as one of the great masters of informal art: Emil Schumacher, the Fautrier of Germany.

Roland March