Untitled by Kumi Sugai (1919-1996)

Oil on canvas, framed

Signed Kumi SUGAÏ and dated 1954 to the lower right; stamp of Galerie LA ROUE on the reverse

Provenance: Galerie La Roue, Paris, France

Private Collection, Paris, France

Kumi Sugai was born in Kobe to a family of talented Malay musicians. He studied at the Osaka Bijutsu Gakkō (Osaka School of Fine Arts) from 1933 and at the same time he practiced calligraphy and was fascinated by typography, both of which were to play an important part of his later work. In 1937 however, he had to drop his studies due to a health problem and begun working at Hankyū Railway PLC as a poster designer in the advertising department. At the same time from 1947 until 1949 he studied nihonga (Japanese style painting) under Nakamura Teii (1900-1982).

Sugai moved to live and work in Paris in 1952, studied at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere under Edouard Goerg (1893-1969) and quickly entered the artistic circles of the École de Paris and the Nouveau Réalisme, befriending artists such as Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), Hisao Domoto (1928-2013) and Yasukazu Tabuchi (1921-2009) amongst others. His early abstract expressionistic oil paintings were popular and Sugai’s early solo shows in Paris and Brussels managed to propel his career further. In 1955 he started making lithographs and in 1956 published a collection of pictures and poems created together with the surrealist poet and art critic Jean-Clarence Lambert (b. 1930) who also wrote extensively about Sugai. By 1960, Sugai had enough work for an impressive retrospective at the Municipal Art Museum, Leverkusen, Germany which further established his reputation as a rising star. At around this time and ever keen to expand his repertoire of artistic expression Sugai began to experiment with bronze casting and transformed some of his usual subjects and forms into sculpture.