On
23 February of this year, a new retrospective exhibit of the 78-year career of
Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama opened at the Smithsonian‘s Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It’s attracted quite a bit of attention, both
from the press and from museum-goers—which isn’t bad for an 88-year-old artist
who first hit the scene in the U.S. in the late ’50s. According to a New York Times report on 27 March, the Hirshhorn recorded
“the highest attendance in 40 years” during the first month of Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors and
about one third of those visitors (about 57,000 people) have come to see the
Kusama show. Though the artist has been
deemed significant for the whole of her career, Hirshhorn director Melissa Chiu
pointed out that “it has only been in recent years that [Kusama] exhibitions
have consistently broken museum attendance records and attracted enormous
attention.”
Back
in 2004, my late mother and I went up to the Whitney Museum of American Art
(then at Madison Avenue and 75th Street) for that year’s Biennial principally
because Kusama was included in the show.
At 75, she was by far the oldest artist featured in the show; promoted as
a kind of retrospective of modern art from the ’60s to the present, the 2004 Biennial
was mostly really new stuff. Most of the
artists in the exhibit were in their 40’s or younger—the only other “older”
artist in the show I identified was David Hockney (portraits, garden and
interior watercolors), only 66 at the time—and Kusama’s installation, Fireflies
on the Water (2002), was
easily the most interesting piece in the show.
Fireflies was a little room, mirrored on all sides
with a still, dark pool of shallow water filling the floor area (there was a narrow
platform to walk on) and all hung
with strings of tiny yellow
and blue Christmas-like LED lights suspended in series
from the ceiling on long, nearly invisible wires that made them look like blinking
lightning bugs.
The mirrors and the water, reflecting the room ad infinitum, did make me feel lost in infinite space, a thematic
impulse in Kusama’s art. One by one, viewers went into the room—there was
an attendant at the door to let people in and keep everyone in line waiting—and
“experience” it (I don’t know what other word to use here) for a few moments.
My
interest in Yayoi Kusama began in the early 1960s. My parents bought a part-ownership in the
Gres Gallery, a small modern-art gallery in Washington around 1957 and Kusama
was exhibited there several times after she first set herself up in the United
States. One early exhibit Gres mounted
was Six Japanese Painters in November and December 1960, a
display of Japanese artists working in contemporary Western styles, rather than
traditional Asian forms—something that was unfamiliar to American collectors at
that time. Kusama was among the painters in that group show (Yukio Karsura, Kenzo Okada, Minoru Kawabata, Toshinobu Onosato, Takeo Yamaguchi were the others), which
toured the country, including such
venues as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the San Francisco
Museum of Art. She did have two solo
shows at Gres: Yayoi Kusama in April
1960 and Yayoi Kusama: Watercolors in
November 1961. Beatrice Perry, the
managing partner of Gres and later Kusama’s dealer, and her husband Hart became
the artist’s friend, even sheltering her at the Perry home when the pressures
got too great.
From
one of the 1960 shows, my parents bought a Kusama canvas, one of her “Infinity
Net” paintings, an untitled 51"-square, red-and-black oil painting that
probably cost a couple of hundred dollars at the time. An abstract pattern of tiny red, irregular blotches
tessellated over a black background so that the canvas looks like a fine
network of black lines surrounding little islands of red, the painting was sold
by my mother in 1996 when Kusama’s work had a surge of popularity; I believe it
went for low five figures. (In 2008, one
of Kusama’s Infinity Net paintings brought $5.1 million at auction, a record
for a living female artist at the time.
In 2014, a 1960 painting sold for $7.1 million at Christie’s.) Despite the de-acquisition, Mother maintained
an interest in Kusama’s art, hence the trip up to the Whitney 13 years
ago. (I’m sure that if she were still
around, Mom would be saving a visit to the Hirshhorn for my next trip down to
D.C. so we could go to Infinity Mirrors
together.)
Yayoi
Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan, in 1929, the youngest
of four children. Her family was
well-to-do, owners of a plant-seed nursery.
The artist’s mother’s family were prominent merchants with numerous,
diverse businesses; her grandfather was both an influential businessman and a
local politician. Because of the
difference in status between the families, Kusama father, Kamon Okamura, took
the name of his wife’s family and moved into the family home. This situation, though not uncommon in Japan,
weakened Kamon (now-) Kusama’s traditional position as the head of the
household. By all accounts, it was an
unhappy marriage; Kusama’s parents fought every day when her father was home
and Kamon Kusama had many affairs, including assignations with prostitutes. Shigeru Kusama, Kusama’s mother, became angry
and domineering, even sending her daughter to spy on her father and his lovers
and report to his wife. This experience
began Kusama’s simultaneous obsession with and fear of sex that has lasted her
whole life.
Kusama’s
father eventually left the family to live with a geisha in Tokyo. Increasingly embittered, Kusama’s mother became
emotionally and physically abusive of her younger daughter. The artist recounts that her mother told her
every day that she regretted bearing her daughter and regularly beat and even
kicked her. “There were some very
dark, unhappy moments in my childhood,” said the artist later, and not a day
went by, she’s confessed, when she didn’t contemplate suicide. At 10, Kusama started being plagued with
recurring hallucinations of dots, nets, and flowers—images that would later
dominate much of her art. She sometimes
saw the dots and other images spreading all around her, essentially enveloping
her world.
The
feeling of being engulfed in patterns gave rise to a phenomenon Kusama called
“self-obliteration.” It would become a
guiding impulse for her art, especially the polka dots that have become her signature
image. She defines self-obliteration as
“obliterating one’s individual self, [so] one returns to the infinite universe.” (In 1967, the artist, then living in New York
City, made a 24-minute film called Kusama’s Self-Obliteration which won prizes at the Fourth
International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium, the Second Maryland
Film Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival in Michigan.) She explains her fixation on dots in terms of
this impulse: “Painting bodies with the patterns of Kusama’s hallucinations
obliterated their individual selves and returned them to the infinite universe.
This is magic.” The artist states with absolute definitiveness:
“Polka dots are a way to infinity.”
The notion “that we’re all just specks in the
universe,” as Elizabeth Blair, Senior Producer on National Public Radio’s Arts
Desk sees it, has been a goal for Kusama since her early childhood. The
mirrored rooms have something of the same point, as I myself experienced. The rooms seem to go on forever and you can’t
tell what’s tangible and what’s incorporeal.
Hirshhorn director Chiu asserted that they make “you feel as if you’re a
speck in amongst something greater.” “Our Earth is only one polka dot
among a million stars in the cosmos,” wrote Kusama almost half a century ago.
(The artist also formed the Church of
Self-Obliteration in a SoHo loft in New York City. Designating herself “High Priestess of Polka
Dots,” she officiated at a wedding of two gay men in 1968. The couple dressed
in a single large bridal gown for two designed by Kusama.)
The
hallucinations impelled the young Kusama to draw what she had seen. “I don’t consider myself an artist,” she
says; “I am pursuing art in order to correct the disability which began in my
childhood.” Kusama began seeing a
psychiatrist who was the first to encourage her to pursue art. She once told an interviewer, “I don’t want
to cure my mental problems, rather I want to utilise them as a generating force
for my art.” The artist, though, has
never depicted her mental illness in her work; she draws artistic inspiration
from her experience of her condition. Her
mother, though, was so adamantly opposed to Kusama’s interest in art that she
took away her daughter’s materials, one time warning, “If you continue to
paint, don’t come home.” Her mother wanted nothing more for her daughter
than that she marry a man of her family’s choosing, almost certainly older, and
become an obedient, subservient wife. A
career in art was out of the question—it was unladylike and led to poverty and
social isolation. Be a collector
instead, Kusama’s family demanded. The artist, however, has called her father “a
gentle-hearted person” who had encouraged her drawing, buying his daughter her
first art supplies, but his absence, stemming from his wife’s constant
bullying, left Kusama resentful. When he
was at home, however, Kusama felt she was caught between her constantly warring
parents
At
13, when Japan became engaged in World War II, the young artist, like many
other children in Japan, was drafted into the workforce, sent off to sew
parachutes for the imperial military.
She recalls that time as one spent in a dark and frightening place. After the war, still determined to paint
despite her family’s pressure to become a good little Japanese wife dressed in
kimonos and dresses her mother bought, Kusama left home in 1948, against her
mother’s wishes, to study Nihonga
painting at the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts & Crafts, 200 miles from
Matsumoto. Nihonga (“Japanese-style painting”) is a formal art style that
employs traditional Japanese materials and techniques, as opposed to Yōga (“Western-style
painting”), which uses European materials and techniques. Kusama found the Nihonga tradition constraining and “the school too conservative and
the instructors out of touch with the reality of the modern era” and seldom
went to class, preferring to stay in her dormitory room and paint.
The
young art student became interested not just in Western art, but specifically
in the European and American avant-garde which was just then gaining
prominence on the U.S. art scene and critical attention abroad. She picked up this influence from
illustrations in magazines and books, so her painting was largely
self-taught. Working on paper in non-traditional
media like watercolor, gouache, and oil, the rebellious art student began
depicting the polka dots that would come to dominate her art. In spite of her defiance, Kusama graduated
from Kyoto Arts and Crafts in 1949 and in 1952, had her first solo exhibit in
March at the the First Community Center in Matsumoto, followed in October by a
second show. In 1954, the emerging
artist had her first solo show in Tokyo and the following year, she was
selected to exhibit in the 18th Biennial at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in
May, her first international show. With
this event, she conceived the dream to go to New York. Even in this ambition, Kusama broke with convention:
as Calvin Tomkins, chronicler of the New York art scene since the 1960s,
asserted in the New Yorker 21 years
ago, “For a hundred years, it had been the tradition for Japanese art students
to go to Paris.”
At
around this time, Kusama’s psychiatrist “encouraged me to get away from my
mother,” she recounts. “If you remain in
that house,” she remembers his warning her, “your neurosis will only worsen.” She began to think seriously about going abroad. Having seen some of her work in a second-hand
book, Kusama began a correspondence with American artist Georgia O’Keeffe in
1955, who gave her advice about advancing her nascent career. The “lowly Japanese girl” also sent along
some of her watercolors, sending some to Kenneth Callahan, a painter based in
Seattle, as well. This bold action
landed Kusama a solo exhibit at Seattle’s Zoë Dusanne Gallery in 1957, and,
despite not knowing a soul in the country, the Japanese artist made plans to come
to the United States for the opening in December. Upon her departure from Matsumoto, Kusama’s
disapproving mother gave her daughter 1 million yen, worth then about $2,800
(the equivalent in 2017 of $24,000), and told her “never to set foot in her
house again.”
Kusama
stayed in Seattle for six months, coming to New York City in June 1958 to take
classes at the Art Students League. This
is the period when she started working on her Infinity Net paintings. Her first New York solo show, after following
O’Keeffe’s advice and peddling her art for over a year to anyone who’d take a
look, was in October 1959 at the Brata Gallery, a well-regarded artist’s
cooperative on East 10th Street in the East Village (preceded in April by The International Watercolor Exhibition,
the Brooklyn Museum’s Twentieth Biennial and followed in November by Recent Paintings by Yayoi Kusama at the Nova
Gallery, Boston). Unable to bring more
than a small amount of currency legally out of Japan with her—she smuggled out bills
sewn into the linings of her clothes—Kusama lived in poverty, and speaking no
English, the artist was not naturally equipped to make acquaintances, even
though she’d trained herself in the un-Japanese practice, especially for a
single young woman, of putting herself in the spotlight and making waves.
In
one way, though, she was fortunate: she arrived in New York City in the era of Willem
de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella (who bought one of her paintings), and
the recently-deceased Jackson Pollock, the very start of the avant-garde art
movements that would dominate the scene in the coming decade: Minimalism, Pop
Art, Op Art—and her work fit right in. (Action
art and Happenings, which would shortly become signature forms of Kusama’s art,
arose at this time, too, when Allan Kaprow staged 18 Happenings in 6 Parts
in 1959 and others, including Claes Oldenburg, joined in the following
year.) The young artist soaked up
everything she could about the world of American art around her. She became friends with Oldenburg and Andy
Warhol—whose styles she presaged and whom some critics say she influenced—and
Donald Judd, an artist who also worked as a critic for publications like Art World, in which he wrote a laudatory
review of the Brata show, and lived at one point in the same building as Oldenburg,
painter Larry Rivers, and sculptor John Chamberlain. As the ’60s dawned
and blossomed in the art scene, Yayoi Kusama emerged with it like Athena from
the head of Zeus—fully formed and ready to astonish and impress.
As
the new decade began, after her first European group show, Monochrome Malerei (“Monochrome painting”) at the Städtisches
Museum in Leverkusen, West Germany, in March 1960, Kusama had the first of two
shows, Yayoi Kusama, at Washington,
D.C.’s Gres Gallery in April. This was
the show that featured the artist’s Infinity Net canvases (one of which, as I
said earlier, my parents purchased). I’m
a little loath to quote the review of the Gres show at length, but Leslie Judd
Ahlander describes very articulately what I recall, even as a 13-year-old boy
who was art star-struck from the experience of hanging around the gallery and
meeting real artists. So, at some little
risk of overstating my case, here’s what the Washington Post art critic wrote about Kusama’s introduction to the
Washington art world:
The work of Yayoi Kusama at the Gres Gallery
is a far cry from the traditional modes of expression. A self-taught artist who has evolved entirely
alone, the artist has moved from pastels which are delicate interpretations of
nature to her present group of large abstractions, based entirely on the
repetition of a simple, circular brush-stroke.
The overall tonality of each canvas is a
single color, red, orange or white, but the color had been given great interest
and variety by the manipulating of the underpinning, the contrast of a flat or
raised technique (often ending in a heavy impasto) and a rhythmic pattern that
goes through each canvas, giving a feeling of movement. Where at first glance the work may seem
static and limited, it slowly reveals its riches as you study it further.
Little remains of the traditional Japanese
approach except the scrupulous attention to detail and the discipline and
controlled technique. Only such an
artist as Mark Tobey or Jackson Pollock in our
country has gone so far in making each single and minute thread of paint
count in overall composition, which must rely for its interest on infinite
variety within a single unity.
It is difficult painting since it takes a
great willingness on the part of the observer to stay with it, to relax and
contemplate at length until the message comes through. Its exquisite and refined delicacy is not for
the hurried.
The
canvases were huge (one was reported to be 14 feet long) and the “little
islands” I described earlier eventually evolved into Kusama’s iconic dots. Her art is marked by psychedelic colors
(which arose after the Infinity Net work morphed into the dot canvases),
repeated images and shapes, and patterns, and manifests autobiographical and
psycho-sexual references. Kusama, always
a prolific artist (one 2009 estimate put the career-long number of her works at
50,000—coming to about 715 pieces a year, or 14 pieces a week), painted the
Infinity Nets “from morning to night.”
The
Kusama Infinity Net painting, which another short review described perfectly
the way I remember it: “Up close her drawings resemble delicate lace or crochet
work; from a distance the viewer can pick out a seemingly endless array of
patterns and forms swirling across the canvas,” hung in my parents’ home for
over 30 years, usually in a location where we would be looking at it while we
were at leisure—talking, reading the paper, having a family drink—so it was part
of our down-time at home. On the one
hand, that meant it faded into our daily world as part of the scenery, but on
the other, it meant I could—and did—look at it unrushed and undisturbed, across
from where I was sitting. What the anonymous
critic wrote above is the way I remember experiencing the painting, and it
mesmerized me. It was one of my favorite
pieces in my parents’ collection; I even tried to make my own version of
it—miserably unsuccessfully—once when I was a kid. (I didn’t say anything about this when my
mother decided to sell the painting, though she asked me for my opinion; I said
it was her art and she should do what she wanted. Some years later, when I told her that the
Kusama had been one of my favorites, she got angry with me for not saying so
back then. I just reminded her what I’d
said at the time: that I hadn’t wanted to interfere with her choices regarding
her possessions. Part of me is sorry
that I hadn’t.)
Into
the ’60s, Kusama took on several other forms, including her much-photographed “Sex
Obsession” sculptures, starting with an armchair which she completely covered
with fat little hand-sewn tubes of fabric stuffed with cotton that looked like
oversized fingerling potatoes but which the artist designated “phalli.” That was 1962; soon she’d similarly covered
“tables, chairs, kitchen utensils, stepladders, a rowboat, a sofa,” and all
manner of other objects with which she was frequently photographed. (The rowboat, complete with oars, was
entitled Aggregation: One Thousand Boats
Show, 1963. Oldenburg had started
his soft sculptures at the same time.) It
was at this time, too, that Kusama began a decade-long relationship with artist
Joseph Cornell, 26 years older than she. As you might expect with Kusama, it was a
peculiar romance: though Kusama herself called Cornell her lover, there was no
physical intimacy between them. “I
disliked sex and he was impotent so we suited each other very well.” (Cornell’s mother, with whom he lived his
entire life, was clearly a major cause of his sexual dysfunction, for, among
other things, she forbad him to touch women and told him that “women are a
disease,” according to Kusama.) Nonetheless,
Kusama characterized their relationship as the great romance of her life, and
she remained with Cornell until his death of heart failure in 1972 at the age
of 69.
While
she was attracting a great deal of attention, even awe, her works were selling
for as little as $150 or $200. Her work
was attracting more attention in Europe than in the States, and she had more
shows abroad. Her colleagues here, with
many of whom she often exhibited in group shows, were being taken up by galleries
to represent their work, Kusama couldn’t find a dealer who’d commit to
her. Some of this standoffishness may
have been because she was a woman in what was still a man’s world (O’Keeffe,
Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Nevelson, Grace Hartigan, and a few others, not
withstanding), some of it may be that even for the ’60s, Kusama was a little
daunting, and some of it may have been influenced by the precarious state of
her health, which often left her incapacitated by illness, either psychiatric
or physical. But certainly part of the
distance the art world put between itself and Yayoi Kusama was the residue of what
art-and-culture writer Andrew Solomon called “aggressive wartime prejudice
against Japan.” In any case, as
Alexandra Munroe, an art historian who was in large part responsible for the
resurgence in the West of interest in Kusama’s art in the ’90s, concluded, the
artist “was too beautiful, too crazy, and too powerful” for the art scene in
the U.S. to handle.
As
if to prove Munroe’s point, by the mid-1960s, Kusama turned from canvas and
paper as the media for her art to room-sized installations, starting in 1965 in
New York with Phalli’s Field, a 15' x
15' mirrored room filled with hundreds of her fabric penis sculptures covered
in white cloth with red polka dots.
Ultimately, this led to 2002’s Fireflies
on the Water (displayed again at the Whitney in 2012 as part of Yayoi
Kusama, a retrospective) and the six mirrored rooms (including Phalli’s Field) assembled for the Hirshhorn’s Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors
(running through 14 May). By 1967,
Kusama had moved entirely away from making any kind of art object and devoted
herself to Happenings. These were mostly
improvised guerrilla street performances in which a group of young performers,
some wearing masks of Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, stripped naked
and a usually-clothed Kusama would paint their bodies with polka dots. They were purportedly protest demonstration,
against the Vietnam war, racism, segregation, and for free love and expression,
gay rights, and women’s lib—all the issues of the “flower-power” ’60s. Most of the Happenings were performed in the
street or open space in front of such establishment structures as the Statue of
Liberty, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and New York Stock Exchange in 1968, where
her hippie acolytes handed out flyers declaring, “STOCK IS A FRAUD!” and, “OBLITERATE
WALL STREET MEN WITH POLKA DOTS” in a foreshadowing of the Occupy Wall Street
demonstrations 43 years later. There was even an un-authorized invasion of
the Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden (announced to the press in advance,
but unknown to the museum) with Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at MoMA in
1969 in which the participants cavorted in a fountain, striking poses that
mimicked nearby sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, and Aristide
Maillol. (Kusama returned to MoMA with
the authorized one-woman show Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1972 in
1998.)
Like her penis sculptures, Kusama’s Happenings were
always recorded in photographs, for the artist was nothing if not a master
self-promoter! She came to see publicity
as a form of art in itself, and by 1968, she was more prominent in the press
than even Andy Warhol. “Publicity is
part of my art,” she wrote in Kusama Orgy, her sexual-freedom newspaper which reported on her activities and promoted her ideas and opinions.
She was usually surrounded by a gang of hippies, among them the gay young men she dubbed the Kusama Dancing Team, who behaved like disciples, and started a
gay social club called the Kusama ’Omophile Kompany (kok). She’s boasted that she was “reported on
almost as much as Jackie O. and President Nixon” and in 1968, the artist wrote
President Nixon a letter offering to have sex with him if he’d end the Vietnam
war. By the end of the decade, however,
the artist had become over-exposed and was seen by many as an attention-seeker
who’d exceeded her Warholian 15 minutes of fame.
For someone with not a single tie to the United
States or New York, except perhaps in her imagination, Yayoi Kusama not only found
herself a viable niche in the art scene here, but reveled in it. (There’s no doubt, of course, that she could
never have lived the kind of life she was living in New York if she’d remained
in Japan, even in Tokyo much less Matsumoto. Back home, she was considered a “naughty girl”
even off of the mildly rebellious behavior she exhibited in the ’40s and ’50s.) Broke
and depressed, however, Kusama’s health, both physical and mental, had
deteriorated so badly by 1973 that she had to return to Japan. (Furthermore, Kamon Kusama, the artist’s father, was
ill and would die in 1974 after a long
illness. This came just two years after
Kusama also lost Joseph Cornell.) Her
doctor in New York had missed a serious thyroid condition and fibroids in her
uterus and she underwent surgery in Tokyo to correct the medical problems.
Back home, Kusama’s avant-garde work attracted
little attention from the galleries and art publications. She mounted a couple of Happenings in Tokyo,
but they were met with meager response and the press declared her a “national
disgrace.” What little coverage they got
wasn’t from art journals, but from men’s magazines. Eventually, Kusama essentially gave up all
her art work and turned to writing a series of strange and surrealistic novels
about New York’s downtown sex scene.
(She’d been writing poetry since she was 18.) Between 1977 and 1990, she published 10
novels. In 1983, Kusama was awarded the Yasei
Jidai literary magazine prize for her novel Kuristofa danshokukutsu (“Christopher
homosexual brothel”).
In 1975, she voluntarily committed herself to the Seiwa
Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Tokyo; in 1977, she moved into the private
clinic permanently and has lived there ever since, writing and painting in her
room. The artist is free to come and go
on her own volition and she has a studio in a building in walking distance from the
clinic where she works for eight hours daily, returning to the hospital at
night. (She also travels to exhibits
abroad, but her hospital room is her base of operations.) In all the time she’s been in the hospital,
the artist’s mother visited her only once; in 1984, Shigeru Kusama died.
Kusama
eventually returned to painting and has amassed a large number of canvases
which she shows all over the world even as she continues to create her mirrored
rooms. In the ’90s, she experienced a
resurgence of interest in her work both in the West and in Japan and even in
her ninth decade of life, she keeps up a crowded schedule of exhibits and the
attendant interviews, appearances, and vernissages. That’s what generated my mother’s decision to
sell her Kusama Infinity Net, and it also generated coverage not only in the
art press (Andrew Solomon’s “Dot Dot Dot: The Lifework of Yayoi Kusama” in ArtForum, February 1997, for example),
but in such general-interest journals as the New Yorker (such as the four-page spread by Calvin Tomkins, “On the
Edge,” 7 October 1996). In September
1989, following 1987’s Yayoi Kusama
at the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Fukuoka, the first retrospective
exhibit of her work in Japan, Alexandra Munroe curated the first retrospective
of Kusama’s art in the United States, the Center for International Contemporary
Arts’ Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective
in New York, essentially launching the renewed interest in the artist, known in
Japan as the “Kusama boom.” Between that
year and 1999, there were at least 59 solo Kusama exhibits around the world
(plus many more group shows in which her work was included). Of those, nine were abroad in either Europe
(including the 45th Venice Biennale in June 1993) or Asia outside Japan, 15
were in galleries and museums in the U.S. (including Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama 1958-1968 at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York), and 35 in Japan, the country that had previously turned its back on
Kusama’s art and made her feel unwelcome.
A remarkable reversal of fortune.
In
1993, Kusama was designated the first female artist to represent Japan at the
Venice Biennale, perhaps the most prestigious art show in the world, from 13
June to 10 October. The Japanese
pavilion at the 45th Biennale housed a retrospective of Kusama’s art reaching
back to 1959, including examples of her work in all its variations (except, of
course, her live art and Happenings). The highlight of the show was Kusama’s
new creation, Mirror Room (Pumpkin)
(1993), a mirrored room filled with small sculptures of pumpkins; she herself
stayed in the room, dressed in a color-coordinated outfit modeled on a
magician’s costume: a yellow witch’s hat and long yellow dress all covered with black
polka dots. Having been inspired to
sculpt pumpkins because one of the plants her grandfather’s seed farm grew was
that fruit and the color, shape, and appearance of them intrigued young Kusama
when she used to visit the farm with her grandfather. She went on to make scores of pumpkin
sculptures, large and small—some of them mirrored themselves—and this object
has joined the polka dots (which often appear on the pumpkins, too), Infinity Nets,
and mirror rooms as iconic Kusama imagery.
At
home, Kusama, who now seldom appears in public without her signature attire:
a bright orange wig in a bobbed style, fiery red lipstick, and a vividly-colored
one-piece floor-length dress of polka-dotted fabric (usually coordinated with the
art on display or based on one of her paintings), went from national scandal to
the most important living Japanese artist; in 2006 she received the Praemium
Imperiale, one of Japan’s most prestigious arts prizes—the first woman to win
the award. In 2011, Kusama published her
autobiography, Infinity Net
(University of Chicago Press), which David Pilling, Asia editor of the Financial Times, characterizes as “better treated as artistic
statement than faithful record.” (In 2012,
Heather Lenz, a documentary filmmaker, started work on Kusama: Princess of
Polka Dots, a seven-minute version of which was edited for the
Tate exhibit. Still incomplete and
retitled Yayoi Kusama: A Life in Polka
Dots, the project explores the artist’s whole life and work.)
The
artist has been designing clothes since the ’60s (some of which she called
“orgy clothes” with holes cut in uhhhh
. . . critical locations), but in 2012, she entered into an arrangement with
the French luxury design firm Louis Vuitton and her iconic polka dots adorned
the company’s high-end handbags, luggage, sunglasses, scarves, and coats. The New York store on Madison Avenue in the East
60’s was decorated with a display of red dots and the company sponsors many of
Kusama’s shows. At her Tokyo studio, in
addition to her paintings, “colorful and hieroglyphic, with repeating
motifs—eyes, profiles, tendril-like fringes, things that appear to be cells or
viruses,” she makes products from “fabric to clothing to mobile phones,” according
to Tate Modern curator Frances Morris. (Tate
Modern held another well-received retrospective exhibit, Yayoi Kusama, from 9 February through 5 June 2012.)
Just
like the young Kusama who came to the U.S. in the 1950s “in a quest to become
the most famous possible version of herself,” as a New York magazine writer expressed it—and she made it for a while—the
present-day Kusama still proclaims, “I want to become more famous, even more
famous.” The attention-getting naked Happenings, of which she staged some
200 in their day, and the penis sculptures may be behind her, but with a boost
from businesses like Louis Vuitton and museums like the Hirshhorn, she may just do
it again, too. In a 2009 interview, she
proclaimed: “As long as I have the energy, I will carry on. I’d like to live
200 or 300 years. I want to leave my
message to my successors and future generations.”
