Kumi SUGAÏ

Kumi Sugai – Life, Lithographs and Original Prints of a Japanese Painter in Paris

Kumi Sugai (born Teizō Sugai in Kobe on 13 March 1919; died in Kobe on 14 May 1996) was among the most widely recognised Japanese artists of the post-war School of Paris. Settling in Paris in 1952, he moved from a dark, calligraphic abstraction peopled with signs and creatures from Japanese folklore to a hard-edged geometric idiom of flat, saturated colour, drawn from motorways, road signs and speed. Painter, sculptor and printmaker, he showed at documenta, the Venice Biennale and the Tate Gallery, and left a substantial body of original lithographs and screenprints.

Le Coin des Arts currently offers Sugai’s original lithograph ‘S (flèches bleues)’, 1990, a sheet from the ‘S’ series that dominates his final period, in which arrows, circles and bands of colour are pared down to a handful of crisp signs. Like every print in our catalogue, it was chosen for the quality of the impression, the edition, provenance and condition. To hear when further works arrive, simply ‘follow the artist’ on this page.

Kobe, Hankyu posters and an apprenticeship in Japan (1919-1952)

A sickly child, Sugai entered the Osaka School of Fine Arts in 1933, aged fourteen, but left without completing his studies. In 1937 he joined the advertising department of the Hankyu railway company, designing posters until 1945, and in 1941 he took the artist’s name Kumi. Commercial design taught him the economy of a sign that must be read at a glance – a lesson that would resurface decades later. After the war he studied nihonga, Japanese-style painting, for about a year under Nakamura Teii, and came to know Yoshihara Jirō, later the founder of the Gutai group, before devoting himself to painting from 1947.

Montparnasse and the School of Paris (1952-1962)

Sugai sailed for France in 1952, settled in Montparnasse and attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. His first solo exhibition opened at the Galerie Craven in 1954, the year he was also shown at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels; later Paris shows followed at H. Le Gendre (1957) and Galerie Creuzevault (1958 and 1963). Paintings such as Shiro (June 1957, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) and Kabuki (1958, Museum of Modern Art, New York) combine calligraphic marks and mask-like forms on sombre grounds. In 1957 he illustrated La Quête sans fin by the poet and critic Jean-Clarence Lambert.

International recognition came quickly: the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (1955, 1958, 1961, 1964), documenta II and III in Kassel (1959, 1964) and the São Paulo Biennial (1959, 1965). Prints won him his first prizes – the Zagreb Museum of Modern Art prize at the Ljubljana International Biennial of Graphic Arts (1959) and the Grand Prix of the Grenchen Triennial of colour prints in Switzerland (1961). In 1962 he represented Japan at the 31st Venice Biennale, receiving the David E. Bright Foundation Prize for artists under forty-five.

Sugai in British collections: the V&A and the Tate Gallery

British audiences met Sugai early. The Victoria and Albert Museum acquired his colour lithograph Violet (1959-60) as early as 1960; the impression, numbered 14/120, is signed twice in pencil, ‘Kumi’ in Japanese characters and ‘Sugaï’ in roman letters, and bears a publisher’s stamp with Zurich and Paris as places of publication. In 1964 his work was included in 54-64: Painting & Sculpture of a Decade, the landmark survey organised by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation at the Tate Gallery, which brought together leading painters and sculptors of the previous ten years.

Motorways, signals and the accident of 1967

From the early 1960s Sugai abandoned texture and gesture for crisp, matt forms painted in acrylic: circles, half-circles, stripes and arrows recalling traffic signs. A keen motorist, he made around fifty works between 1964 and 1968 with ‘Auto’ in their titles. In 1967 a serious car crash left him badly injured; no longer able to paint unaided, he devised a modular method of combining basic shapes according to predetermined rules. He returned to the Japanese pavilion at Venice in 1968, and in 1969 travelled back to Japan to install the large mural Festival de Tokyo in the new building of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, with a major exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, the same year.

The ‘S’ series and the late work (1970-1996)

A retrospective covering 1952-1983 was staged at the Seibu Museum of Art, Tokyo, in 1983. In the 1980s Sugai reintroduced a rougher paint surface and began the ‘S’ series, painted on canvases of identical size, in which the letter, the arrow and the circle became endlessly variable motifs; the 1990s brought the cadmium red paintings, the Tambour and S Circle works. Lambert’s monograph Sugaï appeared from Éditions Cercle d’Art in 1990. Sugai died in Kobe on 14 May 1996. His widow, the painter Mitsuko Sugaï, gave a large untitled canvas of 1986 to the Centre Pompidou in 1999, the year the Maison de la culture du Japon in Paris showed his late paintings; a retrospective toured the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 2000, and the Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum marks the thirtieth anniversary of his death with an exhibition from 2 October to 6 December 2026.

Sugai the printmaker: lithographs, screenprints and the Hara catalogue

Sugai discovered printmaking in Paris and made his first lithograph in 1955; lithography remained his principal medium, and from 1977 he concentrated on it almost entirely. He also used screenprinting, notably for the zodiac series and the Festival prints of the 1970s. As early as 1961 the Paris publisher Georges Fall issued the portfolio Dessins 1957-1960. In the 1960s the Galerie Brusberg in Hanover published lithographs printed in Paris by workshops such as Desjobert and Michel Casse, while some late sheets carry the name of the Atelier Clot.

The standard reference is Katsuo Hara (ed.), Sugaï: catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre gravé, published by Art Dune in 1996. A description reading ‘Hara 105’ refers to the print’s number in that catalogue, against which title, date, dimensions, edition size and printer can be checked.

Collecting Kumi Sugai prints: a buyer’s guide

Signature. Genuine impressions are signed in pencil, frequently twice – ‘Kumi’ in Japanese and ‘Sugaï’ with its diaeresis. See our notes on the signature.

Edition. Check the numbering against the edition recorded by Hara; editions of the 1960s are often small (50 or 60 impressions), later ones larger. More on the printing and on what makes a print original.

Paper and margins. Look for good wove papers such as Arches or BFK Rives, full margins and, where present, the publisher’s blind stamp.

Condition. Sugai’s large fields of red, blue and yellow show fading, foxing and handling marks readily; examine them in raking light.

Pitfalls. Exhibition posters and offset reproductions repeat his geometric motifs but are neither pencil-signed nor numbered. Our authenticity and framing pages explain our guarantees and conservation framing.

Le Coin des Arts selects Sugai’s prints for freshness of colour and sound provenance. You may also enjoy Zao Wou-Ki, Chu Teh-Chun, Léonard Foujita, Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages, the School of Paris and lyrical abstraction, and our engravings and lithographs.

Sources and further reading

Katsuo Hara (ed.), Sugaï: catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre gravé, Art Dune, 1996 · Jean-Clarence Lambert, Sugaï, Éditions Cercle d’Art, Paris, 1990 · Victoria and Albert Museum – Violet, 1959-60 · Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation – 54-64: Painting & Sculpture of a Decade · The Japan Foundation – Venice Biennale 1962 · Centre Pompidou – Untitled, 1986 · Guggenheim – Shiro, 1957 · Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum – Sugai Kumi (2026)