In a yellow polka-dot dress, her hair bright orange, avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama reads her own words in 2017. "I want to keep fighting as an artist, until the end of the universe. Until I drop," she says from her wheelchair at the opening of a major retrospective exhibition in Tokyo.
On August 14, Kusama passed away in a hospital in Tokyo, her foundation announced today. She was 97 years old.
Kusama was a global phenomenon: a pioneer who was ahead of pop art and minimalism, and one of the most influential artists Japan has ever produced. "Keep loving my work, even when I am no longer here," she said in 2017. "Let me be your eternal idol."
Hallucinations became art
As a child, Kusama played among her family's violet fields. One day she began to see a human face in every flower. The violets spoke louder and louder to her until their voices caused pain. She fled home and hid trembling in a closet.
Drawing helped. Flowers, flashes of light, and patterns that imposed themselves on her in hallucinations, she captured. "That is the origin of my paintings," she wrote in her autobiography.
At home, she found little support for her creativity. Her mother sent her as a little spy after her unfaithful father and regularly tore up her drawings. Kusama kept working, if necessary on burlap sacks and with stolen paint.
Hallucinations and panic attacks would continue to haunt her, and painting became her way to control them. "The only way I have found to relieve my illness is to keep making art," she wrote.
In 1952, the 23-year-old Kusama filled a community center with 270 works for her first exhibition. A psychiatrist called her a genius and advised her to distance herself from her mother. She wrote to American artist Georgia O'Keeffe for advice and received a reply. Five years later she left for the United States.
In New York, she lived in bitter poverty. Her windows were broken, her bed was a discarded door, and she cooked soup from fish heads and cabbage leaves. When the cold kept her awake, she painted on. On black canvases, she placed tens of thousands of white arches, without beginning or end. These 'Infinity Nets' earned her first solo exhibition in New York in 1959. It was so crowded that the audience stood in the street.
Disappeared and rediscovered
In 1965, Kusama built her first mirror room. Visitors saw hundreds of red-dotted shapes and themselves endlessly reflected as an 'infinite universe.' A year later, at the Venice Biennale, she placed 1,500 mirror balls on the grass and sold them for 2 dollars each. "Your narcissism for sale," it said. With performances against the war, in which she painted naked participants with dots, she grew into a figurehead of the New York art world.
But the fame proved fleeting. Kusama returned exhausted to Japan in 1973 and four years later voluntarily moved into a psychiatric hospital. During the day she worked in her studio across the street; in the evenings she wrote novels and poems.
From the late 1980s, she gained international attention again. In 1993, she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale, one of the world's most important art exhibitions. She filled the Japanese pavilion with mirrors and dotted pumpkins, which later became her trademark.
After that, she definitively broke through to the general public. Her yellow pumpkin on the Japanese art island Naoshima, her mirror rooms, and collaborations with Louis Vuitton made her dots recognizable worldwide. In 2016, she received the Order of Culture, Japan's highest cultural honor. And she also receives much attention in the Netherlands: on September 11, a retrospective of more than seventy years of her work opens at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Until the end, Kusama kept painting. Sometimes she started in her pajamas and forgot to have lunch, she said in one of her last interviews: "At this age, even one minute is precious to me." About her legacy she wrote: "A human life has a limit, but art remains for future generations. I will never stop making works that continue to shine after my death."