Yayoi Kusama, Pop Artist Who Expanded and Endured, Dies at 97
The Japanese artist's polka-dot-covered paintings, phallic sculptures and public performances cause a stir in New York City and Europe in the 1960s.
by Holland Cotter / NYT
Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese artist whose polka-dot-covered paintings, phallic sculptures and public performances caused a stir in New York City and Europe in the 1960s, and whose mirrored “Infinity Room” installations became selfie sensations and blockbuster museum and gallery attractions in recent decades, died on Aug. 14 in Tokyo. She was 97.
The Yayoi Kusama Museum and the Yayoi Kusama Foundation announced her death, at a hospital, on Thursday.
Ms. Kusama first gained attention in the late 1950s and early ’60s with immense abstract paintings that she called “Infinity Nets.” They were composed of countless small, curving strokes of paint on all-white or all-black surfaces, suggesting a giant, swirling mesh pierced with pinprick holes.
Far larger in scale than the Abstract Expressionist works that were then dominating New York galleries, her pieces quickly attracted the notice of young artists who were trying to take American art in new directions. One was Donald Judd, who was working at the time as an art critic and formulating what would become Minimalism. He bought a painting, helped out in her studio and began championing her work.
Creating art incrementally from repeated components became Ms. Kusama’s mode of working, and she applied it to sculpture as well. In the early 1960s, she began sewing thousands of stuffed fabric phalluses, painting them white or gold and gluing them onto the surfaces of everyday objects — tables, armchairs, coats, shoes, a baby carriage, a rowboat — to create bristling, room-filling installations.
These “Accumulation Sculptures” made their debut, along with work by Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol, at a group show at the Green Gallery in New York in 1962. It was among the first exhibitions of Pop Art, and with it, Ms. Kusama was recognized as a pioneer in the two major avant-garde styles of the day, Pop and Minimalism.
Although her work was often seen as assertively erotic, its intended effect was the opposite. As she explained in her autobiography, “Infinity Net,” published in Japan in 2002 and later in the United States, she found sexual organs threatening, a reaction that she traced back to infantile experiences. Yet she frequently had herself photographed lying scantily dressed or naked on fields of tumid forms.
“By continually reproducing the forms of things that terrify me,” she wrote, “I am able to suppress the fear.”
Yayoi Kusama was born on March 22, 1929, in the city of Matsumoto, northwest of Tokyo. She was the youngest of four children in a prosperous middle-class family. Her father, Kamon Kusama, and mother, Shigeru Kusama, helped oversee the family’s wholesale seed business.
As a teenager, Yayoi aspired to become a professional artist, an unusual ambition for a woman in conservative postwar Japan. In 1948, over the objections of her parents, she enrolled in art school in Kyoto and studied Nihonga painting, a style that merged Japanese and Western traditions.
But chafing at academic discipline and the style’s association with wartime nationalism, she soon went her own way. Immersing herself in reports of Surrealist-inspired art in Paris and New York, and keeping a close eye on avant-garde developments in Japan, Ms. Kusama began producing hundreds of semiabstract paintings that set floral, astronomical and sexual forms against fields of dots and spiky lines.
Such images, she later said, reflected the hallucinations that had plagued her all her life. “I am pursuing art in order to correct the disability which began in my childhood,” she explained.
She began exhibiting in her teens, and gaining attention. In 1955, three of her paintings were sent to New York to be included in an international watercolor exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, and she began to make plans to move to the United States.
In need of advice on how to establish a career there, she wrote to Georgia O'Keefe – the only female American artist she knew of — after tracking down her address in New Mexico through the United States Embassy.
Ms. O’Keeffe replied with encouragement, and in 1957 Ms. Kusama flew to Seattle, where she spent about six months before moving to New York City.
The allure of her personal presence increasingly became a component of her art. She was aware that as an Asian woman in New York she was seen as an exotic outsider in the city’s art world, an identity that had useful marketing potential. Calibrated orientalism became the substance of some of the public performance work she developed in the mid- to late 1960s, when she aligned herself with the flourishing hippie culture.
In a series of anti-authoritarian and specifically anti-Vietnam War happenings starting in 1966, Ms. Kusama made guerrilla appearances in strategic locations in New York City — on Wall Street, at the Statue of Liberty and on the Brooklyn Bridge — leading a group of volunteers. On her cue, they would strip down and pose as she painted their naked bodies with polka dots, to which she sometimes attributed magical properties.
“With those polka dots,” she said, “the people will self-obliterate and return to the nature of the universe.”
She herself remained fully clothed, although she often wore a dot-covered costume.
These events, which she called Body Festivals and Anatomic Explosions, had pragmatic dimensions. The display of bare flesh was calculated to grab public attention; if the police showed up, all the better. Controversy was valuable for promoting Ms. Kusama’s extra-aesthetic activities, which included a pop-up boutique, Kusama’s Korner, at Bloomingdale’s and a gay bar called Kusama’s Omophile Klub.
All of this represented success, for a while. But trends were fleeting in that chaotic time, and as the flower-child 1960s gave way to the grimmer 1970s, Ms. Kusama’s art spectacles began to look old. Sensing that Americans had lost interest in her, she returned to Japan in 1973.
In Tokyo, to support herself, she sold modern and contemporary Western art until the mid-1970s oil crisis ended the Japanese economic boom and forced her to find other sources of income. She began making collages inspired by the American artist Joseph Cornell, with whom she had earlier formed an intense but platonic relationship.
She also began writing fiction, publishing more than a dozen novels — some of them, like “Manhattan Suicide Addict,” autobiographical — and wrote several volumes of poetry. But all of that activity was not enough to stave off her panic attacks and hallucinations, which became acute. In 1977, she admitted herself to the Seiwa psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. She would eventually make it her permanent home, building a studio nearby.
With the emotional security that the hospital environment afforded, she continued to work at high volume, producing brightly colored paintings, some with patterns suggesting capillary webs or swarms of spermatozoa, others incorporating figures and flowers and recalling her Surrealist-tinged work of the 1950s.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, she returned to creating encompassing installations for the first time in three decades: rooms covered entirely in polka dots and mirrored “Infinity Rooms.”
Her persistent efforts to establish herself and her art as an international brand paid off. In recent years, as Japanese contemporary art and popular culture have gained global attention, interest in her work has soared, along with its prices — a phenomenon she called “Kusamania.”
When one of her 1960 “Infinity Net” paintings sold for $7.1 million at Christie’s in 2014, it was the highest-priced work by a living female artist ever bought at auction.
Ms. Kusama, who was represented by David Zwirner Gallery in New York, also made lucrative agreements to endorse commercial products, including cosmetics and cars. With her dot-patterned wardrobe and fluorescent pageboy wigs, she was an instantly recognizable pop star, invited to contribute to international art shows and given shows of her own, often of new work produced with a platoon of assistants.
One museum show, “Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama 1958-1968,” organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Japan Foundation in 1998, which traveled to the Museum of Modern Art, celebrated her early years. In 2011-12, a larger retrospective was held at the Tate Modern in Britain, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Reina Sofía in Madrid. In 2017, a major survey of her work was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. The same year, a Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo.
Also in 2017, an article in Vice magazine drew attention to repeated racist comments — specifically, racist descriptions of Black people — that Ms. Kusama had made in her autobiography. In 2023, on the occasion of a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the accusations resurfaced and Ms. Kusama publicly apologized.
Iterations of Ms. Kusama’s poetic, endlessly reflective “Infinity Room” — a mirror-lined chamber housing an intricately twinkling LED display — have been box-office gold for museums and galleries, as part of larger exhibitions and on their own. They have drawn enormous crowds, with visitors lining up for hours and entering one at a time for 45 seconds each, just long enough to take a selfie, an exercise in aestheticized narcissism that the artist promoted.
Japan, though slow in coming to appreciate Ms. Kusama, has also honored her with exhibitions. She represented her home country at the 1993 Venice Biennale. (She also took part in the 1966 Biennale, representing herself.) In 2006, she was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for painting, an international prize sponsored by Japan’s imperial family on behalf of the Japan Art Association.
Information on her survivors was not immediately available.
Ms. Kusama’s work has tended to be viewed critically, through the lens of biography and psychiatric pathology, which she encouraged. But that often distracted from her formal skill and pictorial inventiveness, which were evident early on and almost universally appreciated by her first New York critics. Her self-aware wit has also been underrecognized.
“Bring on Picasso, bring on Matisse,” she wrote in her autobiography. “Bring on anybody! I would stand up to them all with a single polka dot. That was the way I saw it. I was betting everything on this and raising my revolutionary banner against all of history.”
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