Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist behind the Infinity Mirror Rooms and the polka-dot pumpkins that made her one of the best-selling contemporary artists alive, died August 14 at a Tokyo hospital of multiple organ failure, her representative David Zwirner said in a statement issued Wednesday. [1][2] She was 97, and by the time of her death, Zwirner said, she "was, without a doubt, the most famous living artist in the world." [1]
CNN and NPR's obituaries both open with that market status: her pumpkin sculptures and polka-dot paintings have generated tens of millions of dollars at auction, an early painting sold for nearly $10.5 million in 2022, and her work fetched a combined $190.5 million across auction houses in 2023 alone. [1][2] Both outlets get to the hospitalization only several paragraphs in. Social-media tributes have run the coverage in the opposite order — leading with the mental illness that produced the work, not the sale prices it later commanded.
The biography explains why. Kusama was born in 1929 into what NPR describes as a "dysfunctional and abusive household," and spent part of her childhood in a wartime factory sewing parachutes for Japan's imperial army. [2] She began experiencing vivid hallucinations as a girl, and later wrote that she drew the visions in sketchbooks "to help ease the shock and fear" of the episodes — though her mother frequently confiscated her art supplies rather than encourage the habit. [2] After discovering a book of paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, Kusama wrote to the American artist for advice; O'Keeffe wrote back candidly that making a living as an artist in the United States would be difficult, but encouraged her to make the trip anyway. Kusama arrived in Seattle in the late 1950s before settling into New York's emerging avant-garde scene. [2]
There, she staged "happenings" in which she painted polka dots onto the naked bodies of fellow Vietnam War protesters and distributed an open letter to President Richard Nixon in 1968 proposing they have sex if he ended the war: "As we soar through the heavens, we'll paint each other with polka dots, lose our egos in timeless eternity, and finally discover the naked truth: You can't eradicate violence by using more violence." [2] Nixon did not take up the offer, and the war continued for seven more years. Despite friendships with Andy Warhol and Donald Judd, Kusama remained, in curator Alexandra Munroe's words, set apart from "the Western mainstream that wrote the first histories of the 1960s avant-garde" — a status CNN attributes partly to her being, in Munroe's phrase, "a foreign woman of color from a chastened Asian power." [1]
By the mid-1970s, exhausted, still hallucinating, and barely making ends meet despite her growing reputation, Kusama returned to Japan and checked herself into a Tokyo psychiatric hospital — a decision NPR and CNN both describe as voluntary rather than imposed, and one she never reversed. [1][2] She continued producing work almost without interruption from a small studio near the facility for the rest of her life, commuting between the hospital and her art for close to five decades. Global recognition arrived late: a 1989 retrospective in New York resurrected paintings the art world had largely forgotten, and in 1993 she became the first artist to officially represent Japan at the Venice Biennale — 27 years after unofficially gatecrashing the same event by scattering 1,500 mirrored balls on the lawn outside the Italian pavilion and trying to sell them for $2 apiece, an attempt officials shut down at the time. [1]
Her later fame brought its own reckoning. Vice reported in 2017 on racist language Kusama used to describe Black people in her 2002 autobiography, and she issued a public apology in 2023 ahead of a new San Francisco exhibition, saying she felt "deep regret" for "hurtful and offensive language" in her writing. [1] That controversy has drawn far less attention in this week's tributes than either her market value or her illness — a third strand of the story that neither the obituary-industrial framing nor the social-media mourning has fully absorbed.
The museum bearing her name opened in Tokyo in 2017, and selfies taken inside her mirrored installations have circulated on Instagram for a decade, evidence of a strange late-career convergence: an artist whose earliest work was a private coping mechanism for hallucinations became, in old age, one of the most photographed experiences in contemporary art. Both facts were true of the same rooms, seen by visitors who mostly knew only one of them.
-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin