Image: Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama
The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama opens an exhibition devoted to the copperplate engraver Tetsuro Komai (1920–1976) at its Hayama building on Saturday 12 September 2026. It occupies galleries 1, 2 and 3a and runs until Sunday 15 November. The museum frames the show as a commemoration of the fiftieth year since the artist's death, and organises it jointly with the newspaper Tokyo Shimbun.
Komai holds a significant place in the history of Japanese printmaking. He encountered copperplate engraving in his mid-teens and went on to study in the oil painting department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, today Tokyo University of the Arts. In 1951 a sandpaper etching of his was awarded the prize reserved for Japanese residents of São Paulo at the first São Paulo Biennial. He joined the activities of Experimental Workshop, a group formed by young artists and musicians, and in 1954 he travelled to France; the museum credits that exposure with shaping the lyrical manner of his later work. He worked repeatedly with writers on illustrated poetry volumes and published on his craft, including a 1976 study of the copperplate matière.
The selection is built principally around the Fukuhara Yoshiharu Collection held by the Setagaya Art Museum, and follows Komai from his earliest work to his last. It takes in rarely exhibited early oil paintings, and the museum states that two bodies of material are being shown publicly for the first time: an oil of a riverside landscape whose title is unrecorded, dated before 1954, and the original illustrations for the children's story Yume o Ou Ko. Works by artists Komai looked to, among them Odilon Redon, Kiyoshi Hasegawa and Kōshirō Onchi, hang alongside his own, while copper plates, working tools and photographs are used to sketch the man behind the prints.
Two lectures accompany the display, both free and neither requiring booking. The printmaker Tatsumasa Watanabe speaks on 19 September about his memories of Komai as a teacher, and the writer and scholar of French literature Toshiyuki Horie discusses Komai's book design on 31 October. Curators give half-hour gallery talks on 26 September and 10 October, free to attend although visitors of high-school age and above need a same-day ticket.
Admission is 1,200 yen for adults, with reductions for students, under-twenties and visitors aged 65 and over, and free entry for children of junior-high age and below. The galleries close on Mondays apart from 21 September and 12 October, and entry is free on 11 October and 3 November. One ticket also covers the concurrent collection display on shadow in contemporary art.
