The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, it has often been reduced to the image of the “polka dot artist”, or even of the “infinity rooms”. It is true that many of his works obsessively feature the characteristic dots, and that some of his most recent and appreciated installations are the Infinity Rooms, which use mirrors and lights to create very suggestive immersive environments. This, however, does not mean that Kusama is dead last August 14th in Tokyo at the age of 97, didn’t have a important role in the art of the twentieth century, with many plagiarists, including famous ones, as we will see, and a prestigious international career, made more difficult by a long psychiatric experience. Today it is one of the most loved and best-selling artists in the world. Let’s see his story.
The beginnings of the artist Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 in the mountainous region of Matsumoto in central Japan. Her family, who made their living growing seeds, gave her a very traditional upbringing: for this reason, when she began to show interest in art around the age of ten, they tried to make her give up. In this period her mother (who even went so far as to tear up her drawings!) forced Yayoi to spy on her unfaithful father with his lovers: the experience was so traumatic that it caused her an obsession and hatred of sex which continued throughout his life and greatly influenced his art.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, the young Yayoi also suffered the fate of school children and went to work (up to 12 hours a day) in a parachute factory. He always continued to draw, and throughout his adolescence he exhibited his works publicly.
In 1948, after the end of the war, she convinced her parents to let her go to Kyoto to study painting (in the Japanese modernist nihonga style). He continued his studies in Kamakura, and began organizing prestigious solo exhibitions in the early 1950s. But the conventional approach of her teachers was no longer enough for her, and he decided to move to the United States also on the advice of the famous American painter Georgia O’Keefe, with whom he exchanged letters.
The revolution: Yayoi Kusama in the United States
Moved to New York in 1957continued to create incessantly: the local artistic environment, however, took several years to grant her the fame she deserved, and in the meantime famous Pop Art artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol appropriated her ideas. When avant-garde artist Lucas Samaras stole his idea of the mirrored roomthe first ever created in the world, Kusama threw herself out of her apartment window.
Once again, however, she didn’t give up and went back to creating. In 1966 he went to the Venice Biennale without invitation to present his famous “Daffodil Garden”a powerful critique of the commercialization of the art world. The work itself consisted of 1,500 mirror balls, which she sold for a few dollars each until she was stopped by the police.
The series of paintings also date back to this period Infinity Net, of the large canvases with endlessly repeated brushstrokes that anticipated the serial techniques of Minimalism and Conceptual Art, and the “Accumulations“, sculptures that depict everyday objects covered in an obsessive series of repeated shapes: these works, also called “Furniture of Compulsion”, were created by collecting objects from the streets of New York (such as a sofa, shoes or an ironing board), which were then covered with forms of white fabric padded with cotton: she identified them as “penises”. The mass of phallic forms, as well as her numerous performances with naked people, reflected Kusama’s efforts in dealing with his sexual anxieties.
Yayoi Kusama from mental hospital to fame
These performances caused big scandal in the USA and Japan; Kusama returned to her native country, but found hostility: after another suicide attempt she sought psychiatric help and was admitted to hospital. Once again, he never stopped creating. They were forgotten for many years, until the Japanese art historian Akira Tatehata managed to convince the government to make them representing Japan at the 1993 Venice Biennale. The exhibition was a worldwide success and finally brought her fame: since then this success, which led her to have her own museum in Tokyo, has never stopped.
Today Yayoi Kusama is the best-selling female artist in the world. Having passed away at the age of 97, she was incredibly prolific and active. You will have seen her in the newspapers and on social media with hers colorful wigs and an eclectic and flamboyant style: Kusama has always been passionate about fashion, and even founded her own clothing company in the late 1960s, with daring garments that featured ambiguous openings (revealing the wearer’s breasts, buttocks, or genitals): for her 1968 “Homosexual Wedding” performance, she even designed an “orgy” wedding dress for two people.
