One artist, one collector, two museums: the Osthaus Museum and the Emil Schumacher Museum are united in the Kunstquartier Hagen. The first is dedicated to the patron of the arts Karl Ernst Osthaus, who had the house built in 1902 in the historicist style to establish a museum for the citizens of Hagen, the first Folkwang Museum. The second presents the life's work of Hagen's exceptional painter Emil Schumacher in a modern exposed concrete building from 2009, which is encased in glass and connected to the Osthaus Museum. It places the works of this artistic maverick in relation to the works of other artists through exhibitions. It presents individual phases of life and aspects of the work of the Hagen artist, who achieved international renown for his gestural-abstract color landscapes with elevations, ravines, fractures, pits and mountains made of pigments.
Large collection
Visitors who enter the centrally located Kunstquartier Hagen on Museumsplatz can thus get closer to two personalities who significantly shaped the region's art landscape in one day: in the Osthaus Museum, the reconstruction of the original interior by the famous designer and architect Henry van de Velde is waiting to be admired. It reflects the concept of the art sanctum conceived by Karl Ernst Osthaus, which offered the avant-garde a secure exhibition space in difficult times. Osthaus was far ahead of his time when he recognized the quality of the emerging modernism, while it was unknown elsewhere and was ostracized for a long time. After his death, his art collection, sensational from today's perspective, moved to Essen in 1922, but today the Osthaus Museum also impresses with exhibits of classical modernism and contemporary art. It has a total collection of 1000 paintings, 800 sculptures and 250 art objects. In addition, there are 5000 works on paper, 700 works of applied art, over 100 installations and around 2000 portfolios, books and object boxes in the archive and library-like presentation "Architecture of Memory" by Sigrid Sigurdsson.
Even though the Emil Schumacher Museum's collection may not be as comprehensive, it is no less worth seeing. The paintings on display allow visitors to get closer to a painter of informal art who sought his expressive power between abstraction and figuration. He used scraps of fabric, stones, leaves and wood for his paintings, mixing colors himself with soot or sand. Sometimes he would attack the paintings with a hammer and other tools to give them the finishing touches. Destruction and fragility are just as much elements of his oeuvre as vibrancy and delicacy, which guests can see for themselves here.
