Biography
Schumann was born as Maria Schirmer to sculptors Dora and Kilian Schirmer in Berlin. As a war refugee of World War II, she grew up in poverty and was malnourished, which led to health problems in her adulthood. She was self-taught in art out of necessity, as her parents could not afford to pay tuition for an art academy, but they nurtured her talent in their studio. Her mother's remarriage to a Nazi Party paramilitary Mann led Schumann to leave home at 15, beginning an apprenticeship in Hamburg. She met gallerist Hans Brockstedt, who took her on his travels to introduce her to the wider arts scene, and she later married him at 18.
During the 1950s, she traveled through Europe with her then-husband Hans Brockstedt, visiting museums and collections, where she exhibited art under the name Maria Brockstedt. After separating from her husband, she lived in London from 1960 to 1963, where she became intimately familiar with the London art scene, and adopted the name Sarah Schumann. In London, she exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) where she sold work successfully; in 1963, due to the cost of living, she moved to the Villa Engadina in Piedmont, Italy.
In 1968 she moved back to Berlin. In this time, she worked on three films by director Helke Sander. From 1968 onward, the women's movement became her biggest priority; together with Helke Sander, she founded the group Brot + Rosen (Bread and Roses), and designed the cover of the Frauenhandbuch Nr. 1 (Women's Handbook No. 1) in 1972, which advocated for women's rights to their body and sexual autonomy, championing abortion and the protection of women from the pharmaceutical industry. The first edition of the handbook sold 10,000 copies, and a reprint sold a further 100,000 copies. She also designed numerous covers for the feminist film theory magazine Frauen und Film (Women and Film).
In 1977, she was one of the founders of "Künstlerinnen international 1877–1977" (International Women Artists 1877–1977) in Frankfurt am Main, which was a pioneering exhibition of women's art that highlighted the exclusion and achievements of women in the historically male-dominated art world in post-war Germany. Around 1,000 works by 182 female artists were brought together, was widely considered a trailblazing achievement in feminist historical research, and was the first exhibition on women's art. Harun Farocki documented her working methods in the film A Picture of Sarah Schumann, which was broadcast on WDR in 1978. At the same time, she published her own essays and created her first major portraits of women. She met her partner Silvia Bovenschen through their shared engagement in the women's movement in the 1970s, frequently collaborating through art and was immortalised in literature in Bovenschen's biography Sarah's Law.
In 1977, she was awarded a scholarship to the Villa Massimo in Rome. This was followed by study visits to India and Kenya for the Goethe-Institut in the 1980s. From 1992, she lived in Moscow for three years and worked on her first series, Moscow. Ore + Body, which was exhibited at the A3 Gallery in Moscow in 1994. Further series followed, such as the landscape paintings from the Mark Brandenburg region in the 1990s and Bridges over Green and Blue as well as Berlin: Strolls in a City in the 2000s.
Schumann lived in Charlottenburg, Berlin with her partner until Bovenschen's death in 2019.
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