With our first special exhibition in 2011, and by public demand, we present Emil Schumacher as the creator of a Gesamtkunstwerk. Thanks to the vast treasures of the Emil Schumacher Foundation, it is possible to show the book page by page. Almost as if the visitors can leaf through it themselves, the richness of Schumacher’s late work unfolds in this exhibition of a masterpiece of book art.

Schumacher’s „Genesis“ (Chapters I through XII) contains 18 original graphics. Created by Emil Schumacher in his Hagen studio in the winter of 1998, and done on acetate printing foil, the pages were printed in Jaffa, Tel Aviv – with Israeli desert sand. The Genesis cycle was developed less than a year before Schumacher’s death and testifies to the artist’s immense creative power that lasted well into his late work. Schumacher was committed to the tradition of the illustrative artist, but does not act literally on this. After intensive study of the Lutheran text, the artist developed the Genesis in his own freestyle expressiveness.

For the artwork Emil Schumacher used the special technique of the terragraph. This too makes the book a very unique work of an artist who, since the beginning of his professional training as an illustrator at the Kunstgewerbeschule Dortmund (Dortmund school of applied arts), and throughout his entire artistic career spanning 60 years, intensively looked into graphics and paper, but also the materiality of his medium, paint. This particular manual printing process, of the screenprints as terragraphs, allows the printing of three-dimensional surfaces and generally compliments Schumacher’s work. The Genesis cycle, developed in 1998 at the Hagen studio, constitutes a synthesis of Schumacher’s entire work.