Kumi Sugai was born 1919 in Kobe. He initially worked as a designer for Hankyu Railway Corporation, where he created the logo for Hankyu Braves, one of the first Japanese professional baseball teams. He also studied Japanese-style painting with Teii Nakamura, but in 1952 moved to France where his first solo exhibition at Galerie Craven won considerable praise. In 1955, Kumai started to work with prints, of which he produced about 400 throughout his life. He won the Print First Prize at the Ljubljana International Print Exhibition in 1959, and the Grand Prix of the Sao Paolo Triennial in 1965. Kumai died in 1996, at the age of 77.

The gallery scene of the 1958 movie “Bonjour Tristesse,” by the way, gives a nice impression of Sugai’s early solo exhibitions. Sugai, who entered the international post-war art stage to gather immense successes as an abstract painter, to me has always been an admirable role model and teacher, as his example taught me about the complex relationships between publishers and artists. As a result, we were able to publish more than 70 of his geometrical-abstract prints during the 1970s-80s.