Yayoi Kusama Dies at 97
With the sad news of Yayoi Kusama's passing, we take a quick trip down memory lane of how she became the magnetic artist she was.
It hasn’t been a great year for the icons of modern art. First, David Hockney passed away some months back, and now Yayoi Kusama—undeniably the most important Asian artist of the post-war era and possibly even beyond that—has died at the age of 97. She actually passed away on August 14, but the news wasn’t made public until 12 days later.
Probably only Hokusai, in the public imagination, is better known, which is a massive statement given the talent of Asian artists. And while gender has become less of a barrier than before, for an Asian woman like Kusama, jumping out of traditional gender roles as she did and becoming a global art icon, only adds to her incredible legacy. Her story is far more complex, far more tortuous than that.
View this post on Instagram
Kusama was born on March 22, 1929, in Matsumoto, a small town in central Japan where her family ran a plant nursery. It wasn’t a happy childhood: it was marked by a physically abusive mother and an unfaithful father, and by the onset, around age 10, of vivid hallucinations—she recalled seeing the red flowers of a tablecloth pattern multiply and spread until they consumed “the whole room, my whole body, and the whole universe.” These experiences, which would terrify most anybody, became her creative fuel. She began sketching these visions obsessively, a practice she said helped her survive them; she later called the phenomenon “self-obliteration,” and it became the engine of everything she made afterwards.
After discovering Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings in a secondhand bookstore, Kusama wrote to her directly, and O’Keeffe encouraged the young artist to leave Japan. In 1957, at 28, Kusama moved alone to New York with little English and no connections, finding Japanese society “too small” for her ambitions. She struggled financially and battled suicidal thoughts, but built a foothold in the downtown avant-garde—Donald Judd bought her first painting for US$200 and became both a lover and a lifelong advocate, while Joseph Cornell and Eva Hesse were early supporters.
Her “Infinity Net” paintings, hand-sewn “soft sculptures” studded with phallic forms, and immersive installations like 1965’s “Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli’s Field” established the obsessive repetition that would define her career. At the 1966 Venice Biennale she staged “Narcissus Garden,” filling the lawn outside the pavilion with 1,500 mirrored balls—uninvited, after Japan had declined to include her. During the Vietnam War she staged public “happenings,” painting polka dots onto nude protesters and even writing to President Nixon proposing peace through polka dots and love.
View this post on Instagram
By the early 1970s, worn down financially and psychologically, Kusama returned to Japan, where her reputation had initially soured over the explicitness of her work. In 1977, she voluntarily admitted herself to a Tokyo psychiatric hospital, taking up residence there for the rest of her life while continuing to create in a studio just across the street. Her rehabilitation in Japan is often dated to her solo representation at the 1993 Venice Biennale, and from there her fame only grew: retrospectives at the Tate, MoMA, LACMA, the Broad, and the Hirshhorn; the towering polka-dotted pumpkin sculptures that became her signature; a namesake museum that opened in Tokyo in 2017; and collaborations with brands like Louis Vuitton that carried her dots onto handbags and storefronts worldwide.
View this post on Instagram
By the 21st century, her name recognition had eclipsed even some of the mid-century American peers she once struggled to be shown alongside. “She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and continued exploration of forever love and eternal soul. We will carry forward Kusama’s wishes and, through art, continue to bring hope and strength for the future to people around the world,” her official studio, Yayoi Kusama Studio, said in a statement.
You May Also Like
