Summary

Modernism is pleased to present its first exhibition of San Francisco painter Ward Schumaker. The survey brings together important paintings from the past twenty years that demonstrate Schumaker’s sustained commitment to iterative explorations in mark making and the integration of gestural abstraction with language and numbers. The exhibition also includes a selection of original books hand-painted by the artist, providing further insight into Schumaker’s expansive practice.

Ward Schumaker (b. 1943, Omaha, NE) is a San Francisco-based artist and acclaimed illustrator whose practice encompasses mixed-media painting, works on paper, unique books and ceramics. His compositions frequently incorporate famous passages of literature from sources such as Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass or the writings of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In others, the artist pulls cryptic phrases from the ether. Both the recognizable and ambiguous language functions as a visual mantra, engaging questions of communication, memory and meditation. 

Using hand-cut stencils, Schumaker creates letters that oscillate between clarity and disintegration. In many cases, language breaks down entirely: letters fragment into abstract forms or dissolve into fields of gestural marks. A significant portion of the work dispenses with text altogether, emphasizing rhythm and movement. Across these variations, Schumaker treats language not only as content to be communicated, but as material to be repeated and transformed.

 
Schumaker’s approach to technique, appropriation and color, are inspired by masters such as Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg and Piet Mondrian, however, music has been a guiding influence throughout Schumaker’s work, often more so than painting itself. His approach to repetition, interval and variation parallels the logic of musical structure, with a particular affinity for Russian composers and minimalist traditions. This influence is made explicit in works such as Philip Glass (Satyagraha), which pays tribute to the composer’s cyclical and accumulative structures.

Drawing in part on techniques encountered in bookbinding, Schumaker developed a distinctive method of combining acrylic paint with methyl cellulose, producing surfaces that allow for both precision and fluidity. This process supports the layered construction of his compositions, where stenciled forms, washes and gestural marks accumulate without competition.
 
While a senior at Omaha University, one of his works won first prize in the Nebraska Governor’s Art Show but was deemed obscene—an assessment that was later regarded as excessive and unfounded—prompting its withdrawal. The episode precipitated Schumaker’s departure from Nebraska and a prolonged hiatus from painting. Schumaker subsequently moved to San Francisco in 1966.

In the decades that followed, he worked as a paper salesman, designer and eventually a highly successful illustrator, producing work for major international publications and clients. Schumaker’s return to painting in his 50s was encouraged in large part by his wife Vivienne Flesher, initiating the body of work presented here.

In 2013, Critic Kenneth Baker, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle about Schumaker’s work observed: “Seldom will you encounter contemporary art in any medium of such relaxed fearless confidence…. Very rarely does a critic encounter new work that immediately rewards a lifetime of learning to look.” Schumaker indeed achieves this and viewing his work becomes a continuous act of discovery.

Schumaker's work is held in the collections of major institutions including the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha; The Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearny; the Letterform Archive, San Francisco; the Sonoma State University Art Collection; and the Zimmerli Art Museum of Rutgers University, among others. Schumaker has also illustrated two limited-edition letterpress titles for The Yolla Bolly Press: Paris France by Gertrude Stein and Two Kitchens in Provence by M. F. K. Fisher, which are included in numerous public collections such as the Boston Public Library, the New York Public Library, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.