“To live in a war and be a refugee is a lifelong education,” Schumann said of a childhood in which he experienced bombings in Germany’s Silesia region, which is now part of Poland.
“There’s no equivalent to it in the U.S.”The printing press posters, chapbooks and calendars he designs drive his messages home and come from an uncompromising faith in “Cheap Art.” His manifesto about it states the importance of its unimportance — cheap, lightweight, undermining the sanctity of affluence and in opposition to the money-hungry “business of art.” For decades, his wife, Elka Schumann, who died in 2021, on a Sunday in August, oversaw the printing press that turns out countless pieces, all drawn with his bold and expressionistic hand and celebrating life while questioning abuses of power.
(One poster of an iris reads “Resistance to the Empire”; a chapbook on courage urges “Dig through the dirt.”)But for all the questions firing like flares at society, with Schumann’s humor and pathos, there is one — far more insular in focus — on the minds of those around him: What will happen to his company when he is gone?
“It’s been an ongoing conversation for 15 years, and we’re still figuring it out,” said his son Max Schumann, 59, an artist and the departing executive director of Printed Matter, a nonprofit based in New York City that sells artists’ books.
Persons:
” Schumann, “, ”, Elka Schumann, It’s, we’re, Max Schumann
Locations:
Germany’s Silesia, Poland, U.S, New York City