Contemporary Artist Yayoi Kusama Dies at 97
Trippy innovator of the avant-garde scene in 1960s New York, Kusama achieved longevity with selfie-worthy immersive environments
Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama, whose renowned work made her the most-expensive female artist, has died. She was 97 years old.
Her death was announced in a statement by the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo and the Yayoi Kusama Foundation. The statement said she died on Aug. 14 in a Tokyo hospital.
“She continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and remained steadfast in her lifelong belief that love can save the world,” the statement said.
Kusama lived by choice in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital since 1977, but the paintings, sculptures, installations and fashion designs she created from her nearby studio have been shown around the world. She is best known for her monochromatic abstract paintings evoking fishing nets, and for canvases and large spaces covered with polka dots, evoking hallucinations she had as a child.
Her Infinity Mirror Rooms, first exhibited in New York, create mind-bending illusions of endless space through reflection and light. They have attracted millions of viewers and are popular on Instagram.
But for Kusama, art wasn’t a path chosen for fame and fortune; art was a sublimation and a salve for her compulsive tendencies and psychotic episodes. “I transformed my trauma into art,” she said in “Kusama: Infinity,” a 2018 documentary. “I convert the energy of life into dots of the universe.”
Initially discouraged from art by her conservative family and ignored by the art establishment, Kusama’s popularity surged in recent decades as curators reassessed her influence on postwar Pop art, which rivals that of contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.
Hailed as a trippy, innovative member of New York’s 1960s avant-garde scene, Kusama was prescient in creating selfie-worthy immersive environments, one of which is permanently displayed at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. Dozens of other museums own her work, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
During a 2017 exhibit of her mirrored installations at Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, visitors with timed tickets stood in hourslong lines to spend a few seconds in each of her rooms. Director Melissa Chiu said the exhibit helped the museum attract 1.2 million visitors that year, doubling its annual attendance.
“People used to sideline her mirrored installations,” Chiu said, “but they give people a chance to step into her infinity. Somehow she became a phenomenon.”
Her gender and ethnicity once arguably worked against Kusama achieving clout in the art world in the early years of her work, but they eventually turned into major selling points. Spurred by wealthy Asian collectors, in 2014 Kusama became the most-expensive living female artist when her 1960 painting “White No. 28,” a monochromatic infinity net, sold at Christie’s New York for $7.1 million. She topped her own record in April 2019 when a 1959 piece from the same series, “Interminable Net No. 4,” sold for $8 million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong. She still holds the title, though it’s a far cry from the $91.1 million paid at auction for Jeff Koons’s sculpture, “Rabbit.”
To market herself, Kusama adopted an outlandish persona, donning brightly colored bobbed wigs, and red leotards or dot-covered gowns for public appearances. In 2012, Louis Vuitton unveiled a collection of handbags and attire designed by Kusama that was characterized by her audacious dots. Still, her rise to fame was hard won.
She was born on March 22, 1929, in Matsumoto, a city in Japan’s central Nagano prefecture. The youngest of four children, Kusama grew up in a family that farmed its vast land holdings and sold seeds for fruits, vegetables and flowers. She once recalled wandering into a flowery field and becoming disoriented among the seemingly endless stalks and blooms—a sensation she likened to “obliteration” and would seek to re-create in her art. Dots surfaced in her childhood hallucinations, she said, and they played a dominant role in her work.
Her mother wasn’t an admirer of the art Kusama started creating at around age 10, and she often snatched away her paintings. “She once kicked my palette across the room,” Kusama wrote in her 2002 autobiography, “Infinity Net.” As a result, she said she learned early on to draw at a feverish pace, and she remained prolific throughout her life. Even into her 80s, she could finish a wall-size drawing in about three days.
Her mother ultimately relented and let her daughter attend art school, but Kusama ached to stretch beyond the country’s traditional Nihonga painting style. In 1955, she wrote to artist Georgia O’Keeffe for advice on how to navigate the “hard life” of a painter. O’Keeffe replied that she should move to New York. Kusama moved to Seattle in 1957, and a year later moved to New York.
Even without the ornate, embroidered kimonos she initially wore to New York’s downtown gallery openings, Kusama would have stood out—an ambitious Asian woman jockeying for attention in an art world that lionized mainly white men. She dated artist Joseph Cornell and befriended other artists such as Donald Judd and Eva Hesse. The first gallery willing to show her paintings was the artist-run Brata Gallery in 1961.
Kusama said many of her experiments in the 1960s met with indifference or, worse, imitators. Turning back to her work in a parachute factory during World War II, she started sewing soft, stuffed fabric sculptures shaped like phalluses and attaching them to sofas, shirts and ladders all painted white—a profusion of bristling sensuality that belied her fear of intimacy, she said.
Green Gallery included one of these pieces, an armchair called “Accumulation No. 1,” in a group show in June 1962 alongside Pop pioneers such as Oldenburg. At that point, Oldenburg was better known for making papier-mâché versions of everyday items like shirts and slices of cake, but a few months later in the same gallery, he debuted a series of everyday objects sewn from fabric, which skyrocketed him to international fame.
Oldenburg later said in an interview that their works differed in that Kusama relied on objects in a single, repeated shape, whereas his soft sculptures represented true-to-life objects.
Artist Lucas Samaras earned raves in 1965 for constructing a room whose inner walls were lined with mirrors; a few months earlier, Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror Room (Phalli’s Field)” show had featured a mirror-lined room covered in stuffed, polka-dot forms. Another echo occurred the following year when she papered her gallery’s wall in images of boats, and shortly after Warhol followed suit with silk-screen images of cows.
The artistic pas de deux took a toll on Kusama’s mental health, sending her into periods of depression. So did the Vietnam War, against which she staged naked protests and happenings that made the cover of the New York Daily News in 1969 and caused a scandal in Japan after newspapers reported on her actions.
After attempting to kill herself, Kusama moved back to Japan in 1973. Instead of getting a hero’s welcome in Tokyo, she spent years being dismissed like a hippie pariah. In 1977, she checked herself into a hospital that championed art therapy and created a series of somber, primordial collages featuring birds, bugs and Bosch-like imagery, including a work titled “I Who Committed Suicide.”
Her comeback began when the Center for International Contemporary Art in New York held a retrospective of her work in 1989. That was followed by an invitation to install her work inside the Japanese pavilion of the 1993 Venice Biennale. Among her works was a room painted yellow and covered in black dots; she wore an outfit to match. Audiences were charmed.
As her success blossomed, Kusama’s fiberglass sculptures of flowers and pumpkins got bigger, her palette brightened and her installations became more kaleidoscopic. Reviewing her 2017 show at the Hirshhorn, Wall Street Journal critic Richard B. Woodward said he admired how her late work felt optimistic, but added, “At the risk of being a killjoy, I only wish it weren’t so increasingly facile and crudely euphoric.”
Kusama received validation back in Japan, where the Matsumoto City Museum of Art exhibited her work, calling her a “genius.” In 2017, her namesake foundation opened the Yayoi Kusama Museum for her art in Tokyo near her home and studio.
“I don’t usually have a fixed idea of what I want to do and don’t know how the painting will turn out. Countless ideas come into my head,” Kusama once told the Journal. “Once I begin painting, though, the image becomes clear. And when it’s finished, I realize that this is the painting that I’ve been trying to make.”