Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist whose polka dots, pumpkins and infinity rooms made her one of the most recognisable artists in the world, died at a hospital in Tokyo on 14 August. She was 97. Across a seven-decade career, Kusama worked in painting, sculpture, installation, performance, film, fiction and poetry. She began making these mirrored environments in New York in the mid-1960s. Despite showing widely in the United States and Europe in that decade, her influence was forgotten after her return to Japan in 1973, eclipsed by the dominance of Anglo-American male artists. Renewed attention followed the 1989 exhibitions at the Center for International Contemporary Arts, New York and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, in addition to the major 1998-9 exhibition Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968, which toured Los Angeles, New York, Minneapolis, and Tokyo. Retrospectives at Tate Modern in 2012 and commercial work for major brands, such as Louis Vuitton, made her an international phenomenon, as renowned for her public persona as for her art.<\/p>\n
Kusama was born on 22 March 1929 in Matsumoto City, Nagano Prefecture, a provincial mountainous region surrounded by the Japanese Alps. The youngest child of Kamon and Shigeru Kusama, she grew up in a conservative, affluent household that owned Nakatsutaya, a wholesale plant nursery, and she took her sketchbooks into the seed-harvesting fields to draw. Kusama had one of her first hallucinatory episodes in violet beds, describing it in her 2002 autobiography as if each flower had its \u201cown individual, human-like facial expression\u201d and \u201cthey were all talking to me\u201d. These overwhelming visions also included persistent images of proliferating nets and dots. It wasn\u2019t until the mid-1970s that Kusama began discussing her psychological condition as the driving force behind her practice, in addition to art being a cathartic refuge from traumatic familial dynamics. Kusama\u2019s birth coincided with a global economic depression and her youth was affected by increasing social unrest and the terror and deprivation of the Second World War. Under Japan\u2019s military regime, school-aged children were required to plant crops, and in July 1944, aged 15, Kusama was sent to sew fabrics at the Kureha Textile factory, producing uniforms and parachutes.<\/p>\n
After the war, Kusama began participating in regional open competitions and group exhibitions. Due to her social class and gender, her traditional parents vehemently objected to her forging a career as a professional artist. In 1948, she left home to study the modern Nihonga style of painting at the Kyoto Municipal Hiyoshigaoka Upper SecondarySchool. Disillusioned by restrictive, hierarchical teaching methods and the nationalist ideology that underscored Nihonga, Kusama began experimenting with a range of Western art practices, producing hundreds of semi-abstract works on paper, utilising ink, pastel, gouache and watercolour. In 1952, she staged two solo exhibitions at The First Community Centre, Matsumoto, and by 1955, emboldened by the critical success of three exhibitions in Tokyo and the inclusion of her work in the International Watercolor Exhibition: 18th Biennial at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, she became determined to move to United States. \u201cStaying in Japan was out of the question,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThis country was too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women. My art needed a more unlimited freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1955, Kusama had initiated a written correspondence with Georgia O\u2019Keeffe, whose work she discovered in a second-hand bookshop, and wrote to Kenneth Callahan, a Pacific Northwest painter she learned about via one of the American Cultural Centers set up by the US Information Service during the Occupation. While O\u2019Keeffe and Kusama wouldn\u2019t meet until 1961, Callahan shared Kusama\u2019s watercolours with the Seattle art dealer Zo\u00eb Dusanne, who offered Kusama her first solo exhibition in United States. After destroying most of her early works before she left, she arrived in Seattle in November 1957 with a few thousand US dollars sewn into her dress and stuffed into the toes of her shoes. Kusama moved to New York in 1958. She organised her first solo exhibition in October 1959 at Brata Gallery, debuting five large-scale white Infinity Net paintings, expansive monochromatic canvases covered with a repetitive mesh of interlocking reticulated shapes, which she continued to make on a compulsive and quasi-industrial scale, often working in uninterrupted stretches of 50 hours. <\/p>\n