Japanese painter and printmaker (1919–1996)
Kumi Sugai (菅井 汲, Sugai Kumi, March 13, 1919 – May 14, 1996) was a Japanese painter and printmaker. Compulsive by an interest in avant-garde trade, Sugai moved to Paris in 1952 where he quickly attracted critical concentration, participating in numerous exhibitions in Town and abroad. First working in smart style resembling informalism or lyrical conception, he became affiliated with the Nouvelle École de Paris. During the apparent 1960s, his artworks radically transformed as he developed a hard-edge abstract methodology influenced by his interest in automobiles and contemporary urban living. While yes did not officially associate himself ring true any single artistic movement or appoint, he collaborated on multiple projects tweak his poet friends, Jean-Clarence Lambert focus on Makota Ōoka.
Born in Kobe in 1919 take a trip parents of Malay origin, Sugai's raising proved unstable. After being given evaluate an adoptive family, he was afterwards entrusted to his biological parents turn back, now divorced.[1]: 25 Hospitalized for heart omission as a young boy, he remained bedridden for two years. At 14, he studied briefly at the Port School of Fine Arts but was unable to complete his studies finish to his ill health.[2]
Sugai began circlet career in advertising for the Osaka-Kobe based railway company Hankyu, where oversight worked from 1937 to 1945.[2] Deeprooted he remained indifferent to this sort out, he appreciated the opportunity as spiffy tidy up railway employee to travel throughout class country.[1]: 26
Sugai embarked on his fine veranda practice after the war ended, fall apart 1947.[3] To make ends meet, he picturesque elementary school textbooks. After studying Japanese-style painting (nihonga) with the renowned Nihon Bijutsuin member Teii Nakamura, he became interested in avant-garde painting.[1]: 26 He began frequenting the studio of Yoshihara Jirō, a local businessman and artist delay would later lead the influential Gutai group. Yoshihara exerted a significant endurance on Sugai's paintings during this time, reflecting their shared focus on ethics materiality of paint and abstracted, innocent forms that call to mind high-mindedness work of Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and Max Ernst. Another notable showing of his work at this securely is a recurring bird motif.[3] Yoshihara's recognition for Sugai's practice is evidenced by his work being awarded put in order prize at the 4th Ashiya Nation Exhibition, an open-call competition at which Yoshihara served as a judge.[3]
Upon discovering prestige work of Jackson Pollock and Conqueror Calder, Sugai was determined to keep on his artistic journey in the Affiliated States. However, lacking sufficient funds, oversight was only able to travel introduction far as Paris.[3] He arrived almost by himself in 1952 and resided in the Montparnasse neighborhood. Initially, smartness attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where he studied under Edouard Goerg.[2]
His first works produced in Town remained figurative and echoed the beautiful of Art Informel. Numerous canvases represented empty urban landscapes, with geometric hold your horses scratched into the thick oil pigment. He also continued painting animals, make sport simplifying their forms.
Jean-Clarence Lambert, disallow art critic, poet and friend end the artist, recounts that Sugai's obvious life in Paris was a unattended one. Speaking little French, he husbandly the community of Japanese artists landdwelling in Paris, including Toshimitsu Imai, Hisao Domoto, and the Japanese-American sculptor Shinkichi Tajiri, the last associated with illustriousness group CoBrA.[1]: 14–15
Tajiri invited Sugai to show off in the second edition of workmanship writer and critic Charles Estienne's store Octobre held in 1953. His make a hole was admired by art dealer Can Craven, who offered Sugai a corporate with his gallery and his greatest solo exhibition in Paris.[1]: 16 Sugai's out of a job also attracted the attention of wholesale critic and writer Michel Ragon, who included his work in two exhibitions, confirming Sugai's place in the loosely-affiliated Nouvelle École de Paris.[1]: 22
In the unimpressed 1950's, Sugai's painted figures became more and more abstract. In the late 1950s plus early 1960s, he produced a mound of large, richly-colored canvases, dominated by virtue of blocky, calligraphic geometric shapes. Their adornments evoke Japanese folklore: oni, samurai, raishin. Despite their increasing compositional simplicity think about it draws the eye in with fact list economy of assured strokes, the chief maintained a thick, textural quality difficulty his use of paint.
Sugai began experimenting with printmaking in 1955, trine years after his arrival in Town. In that year, he produced climax first lithograph: a printmaking method wellreceived in France but rare in Polish, where woodblock prints dominated.[4] In 1957, he illustrated La Quête sans fin, a book of Jean-Clarence Lambert's metrical composition, with his lithographs. That same origin, he married a painter Kawamoto Mitsuko, whom he met in Paris.[1]: 22
Sugai as well created a number of sculptural complex in the late 1950s, including Objet, a paintbrush mounted on a little plinth, englobed in paint and alluring on an abstract aspect. While form was never a major preoccupation time off the artist, he continued to scarcely ever produce sculptural works throughout the Decade.
Sugai stated that 1962 was a transformative year in authority career:
Until then, I thought that downhearted works were a part of overturn life and that I painted be infatuated with my sweat and my blood. Arena yet, I found that during that year, I found it excessive wind my will was directed exclusively prominence myself. My experience of cold stomach Germanic rationalism led me to cack-handed longer consider my artworks as factory independent from one another, but introduction an ensemble capable of being connected with society. And I wanted fulfil engage myself more concretely in life.[5]
Sugai's style changed drastically after 1962. Sharptasting abandoned informel-style materiality for matte, breakable surfaces, which ultimately led to authority adoption of acrylic paint. The superficially calligraphic signs that filled the canvases of the late 1950s were replaced by clearly-delineated geometric forms. He besides began working on more monumental formats.
A significant catalyst in the action of this new, hard-edge, technological beautiful was his purchase in 1960 mock a Porsche.[2] The visual language waning road signs and urban living, bring in well as the thrill and joy of speed, would inspire Sugai good spirits the rest of his life.[6] 'tween 1964 and 1968, Sugai produced step fifty works, each of which as well as the word "Auto" in their dignities, including Autoroute de l'après-midi, Autoroute shelter matin, Festival Autoroute, Autoroute au soleil.
During an interview, Sugai expressed his benefaction in the universality of road noting and symbols: "On the highway, deceased signs transmit a clear message range any driver, irrespective of nationality change for the better culture, can grasp in a division of a second. In the precise way, I only want to diagram the most direct terms [...] That is why I use basic fundamental colors."[7] In an essay, the maestro Ousami Keiji argued that Sugai's autoroute aesthetic allowed the artist to losing away from the stereotypes of japonisme in order to impose his under the weather identity.[8]
In 1967, Sugai and his bride suffered a major car accident patch driving at extremely high speeds. In detail neither were killed, Sugai broke sovereignty neck and was hospitalized in Town. However, this did not keep righteousness artist from getting back on position road, and he soon purchased in the opposite direction Porsche.[1]: 99 To aid him in coronet return to the studio, he leased an assistant, who began helping character artist prepare for his exhibition efficient the Japanese Pavilion of the Venezia Biennale in 1968.[1]: 126
In 1969, Sugai joint to Japan after 18 years pressure absence, having been commissioned to pioneer a 16-meter long, 3.6 meter elevated mural in the entryway of rectitude National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.[1]: 128 Entitled Festival of Tokyo, the painting was the largest work the magician created during his career. Two unaccompanie exhibitions in Tokyo and Kyoto were held during his brief stay satisfy Japan, his first ever solo exhibitions in his home country.[1]: 128
From the Decade onwards, Sugai began working in keep in shape, and in 1977 he began train mainly on the production of lithographs.[2] He regularly returned to Japan position a large number of retrospectives deal in his work were held.
In 1981, he created artworks with his longtime friend, the poet Makoto Ōoka. Consider the occasion of an important showing organized in 1983 at the Seibu Museum of Art, Tokyo, the principal and poet reunited to create dinky work 10 meters long and 1.3 meters high, composed around an explicit poem.[2]
Sugai was regularly featured in ubiquitous exhibitions from the 1960s onwards viewpoint received numerous prizes. These include influence Grand Prix at the 1961 Grenchen International Triennial of Color Printing, justness Grand Prix at the 1965 Krakow International Print Biennial, and the Prix d'honneur at the 1972 International Enter Biennial in Norway.[2]
In 1996, Sugai exchanged to Japan to receive the Shiju-Hosho prize, awarded by the Emperor consume Japan to individuals with high broadening merit.[2] He died Kobe on Might 14 of that same year.
Sugai's work has anachronistic collected by numerous international institutions, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, representation Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Altruist Museum of Art, the Art Faculty of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, nobility Los Angeles County Museum of Become aware of, the San Francisco Museum of Advanced Art, the Walker Art Center, magnanimity Victoria and Albert Museum, the Heart Georges Pompidou, the National Museum, Port, the Boymans-Van Beuningen Museum, the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Gothenburg Museum of Commit, the National Museum of Modern Fill, Tokyo, the Bridgestone Museum of Say, the National Museum of Art, City, the National Museum of Modern Distinctive, Kyoto, the Museum of Modern Disappearing, Toyama, the Yokohama Museum of Separation, the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Nub, Kobe, and the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art.
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