From 1950 on Schumacher's painterly oeuvre saw a radical change as the artist abandoned the subject as pictorial motif and eventually decided in favor of the pure expressiveness of painting around 1955. Henceforth color, line and materiality dominated his work. This stylistic change took place against the background of a contemporary style shaped by the French École de Paris, Tachism and American Action Painting. Schumacher added sand to the paint, in order to achieve the greatest possible three-dimensional effect. The impasto painting medium suspended the dualism of ground and painterly form, pushing the compositional structure into the background in favor of a lively color landscape. Schumacher spreads out a relief reminiscent of encrusted layers of clay and earth in front of the viewer and thus generates a unique visual language with a powerful expression borne by its haptic presence. A press release issued by the MKM Museum Küppersmühle, Duisburg, on the grand solo exhibition “Inspiration und Widerstand” (Inspiration and Resistance, November 15, 2018 to March 10, 2019)" says: "Contemporary art is unimaginable without him: Emil Schumacher (1912 -1999) is one of the most important protagonists of German post-war abstraction which dared a radical new beginning in art after the Second World War, confronting the past with new pictorial inventions." Schumacher liberated the color from the form and the line from the motif and, through this radical emancipatory act, achieved the delimitation of painting from the surface. "Für Berlin" is a wonderful early testimony to Schumacher's seminal decision to break the boundaries of painting by venturing into the third dimension. In order to increase the relief-like effect of his paintings even more, Schumacher then included sand and other non-art materials such as stones, lead, asphalt or sisal in his compositions in later work phases. [JS]