Kumi Sugai

Kumi Sugai (菅井 汲) was a Japanese painter and printmaker.

Born in Kobe in 1919 to parents of Malay origin, Sugai's upbringing proved unstable.

After being given to an adoptive family, he was later entrusted to his biological parents again, now divorced.

Hospitalized for heart failure as a young boy, he remained bedridden for two years.

At fourteen, he studied briefly at the Osaka School of Fine Arts but was unable to complete his studies due to his ill health.

Sugai began his career in advertising for the Osaka-Kobe based railway company Hankyu, where he worked from 1937 to 1945.

While he remained indifferent to this work, he appreciated the opportunity as a railway employee to travel throughout the country.

Sugai embarked on his fine arts practice after the war ended, in 1947.

To make ends meet, he illustrated elementary school textbooks.

After studying Japanese-style painting (nihonga) with the renowned Nihon Bijutsuin member Teii Nakamura, he became interested in avant-garde painting.

He began frequenting the studio of Yoshihara Jirō, a local businessman and artist that would later lead the influential Gutai group.

Yoshihara exerted a significant influence on Sugai's paintings during this period, reflecting their shcared focus on the materiality of paint and abstracted, childlike forms that call to mind the work of Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and Max Ernst.

Another notable aspect of his work at this time is a recurring bird motif.

Yoshihara's recognition for Sugai's practice is evidenced by his work being awarded a prize at the 4th Ashiya City Exhibition, an open-call competition at which Yoshihara served as a judge.

Upon discovering the work of Jackson Pollock and Alexander Calder, Sugai was determined to continue his artistic journey in the United States.

However, lacking sufficient funds, he was only able to travel as far as Paris.

In the mid 1950's, Sugai's painted figures became increasingly abstract.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he produced a series of large, richly-colored canvases, dominated by blocky, calligraphic geometric shapes.

Their titles evoke Japanese folklore: oni, samurai, raishin.

Despite their increasing compositional simplicity that draws the eye in with an economy of assured strokes, the artist maintained a thick, textural quality in his use of paint.

Sugai also created a number of sculptural works in the late 1950s, including Objet, a paintbrush mounted on a small plinth, englobed in paint and taking on an abstract aspect.

Driven by an interest in avant-garde painting, Sugai moved to Paris in 1952 where he quickly attracted critical attention, participating in numerous exhibitions in Paris and abroad.

First working in a style resembling informalism or lyrical abstraction, he became affiliated with the Nouvelle École de Paris.

He arrived there by himself in 1952 and resided in the Montparnasse neighborhood.

Initially, he attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where he studied under Edouard Goerg.

His first works produced in Paris remained figurative and echoed the aesthetic of Art Informel. Numerous canvases depicted empty urban landscapes, with geometric lines scratched into the thick oil paint.

He also continued painting animals, playfully simplifying their forms.

Jean-Clarence Lambert, an art critic, poet and friend of the artist, recounts that Sugai's early life in Paris was a solitary one.

Speaking little French, he joined the community of Japanese artists living in Paris, including Toshimitsu Imai, Hisao Domoto, and the Japanese-American sculptor Shinkichi Tajiri, the last associated with the group CoBrA.

Tajiri invited Sugai to exhibit in the second edition of art writer and critic Charles Estienne's salon Octobre held in 1953.

His work was admired by art dealer John Craven, who offered Sugai a contract with his gallery and his first solo exhibition in Paris.

Sugai's work also attracted the attention of influential critic and writer Michel Ragon, who included his work in two exhibitions, confirming Sugai's place in the loosely-affiliated Nouvelle École de Paris.

Sugai began experimenting with printmaking in 1955, three years after his arrival in Paris.

In that year, he produced his first lithograph: a printmaking method popular in France but rare in Japan, where woodblock prints dominated.

In 1957, he illustrated La Quête sans fin, a book of Jean-Clarence Lambert's poems, with his lithographs.

That same year, he married a painter Kawamoto Mitsuko, whom he met in Paris.

During the early 1960s, his artworks radically transformed when he developed a hard-edge abstract style influenced by his interest in automobiles and contemporary urban living.

While he did not officially associate himself with any single artistic movement or group, he collaborated on multiple projects with his poet friends, Jean-Clarence Lambert and Makota Ōoka.

While sculpture was never a major preoccupation of the artist, he continued to occasionally produce sculptural works throughout the 1960s.

Sugai stated that 1962 was a transformative year in his career:"Until then, I thought that my works were a part of my life and that I painted with my sweat and my blood. And yet, I found that during this year, I found it excessive that my will was directed exclusively towards myself. My experience of cold and Germanic rationalism led me to no longer consider my artworks as works independent from one another, but as an ensemble capable of being associated with society. And I wanted to engage myself more concretely in life."Sugai's style changed drastically after 1962.