Yayoi Kusama dies at 97 after a life spent covering the world in dots

Yayoi Kusama died on 14 August in a Tokyo hospital. She was 97. The Yayoi Kusama Museum and her studio issued the announcement on Thursday, 26 August. They gave the cause in one account as multiple organ failure and otherwise declined to specify it. The studio said she continued to paint until her final days and never set the brush aside.

Kusama was, by the last decade of her life, one of the most visited and most expensive living artists. Her Infinity Mirror Rooms produced queues at Tate Modern, the Whitney and private galleries. Tate’s 2021-24 presentation of the rooms became that museum’s most visited exhibition. Outdoor pumpkins stand at Naoshima, at Liverpool Street Station and in Beverly Hills. In 2022 the early painting Untitled (Nets) (1959) sold for $10.5 million. In 2023 her work took $190.5 million at auction across houses from Hong Kong to New York.

David Zwirner, who represented her for 15 years, called her the most famous living artist in the world at the time of her death. That sentence would have sounded implausible in 1973, when she left New York, and still surprising in 1993, when she became the first Japanese artist to have a solo national pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Hallucinations as a working method

She was born on 22 March 1929 in Matsumoto, in Nagano prefecture, the youngest child in a family that ran plant nurseries and a seed business. She described an abusive mother and a father who had affairs she was told to watch. She also described hallucinations that began in childhood. After seeing a red-flower tablecloth, she wrote, the same pattern covered the ceiling, the windows, the pillars and her body. She painted the dots to control the fear.

“Dots come flying everywhere, on my dress, the floor, things I’m carrying, throughout the house, the ceiling. And I paint them,” she told interviewers. During the war she sewed parachutes in a military factory. After the war she left Japan with money sewn into her clothes, encouraged by a correspondence with Georgia O’Keeffe, and reached New York at the end of the 1950s.

There she made the first Infinity Net paintings, large canvases of small loops that sit between abstraction and obsession. She covered furniture with stuffed phallic forms in the Accumulation series, a way, she said, of repeating the object she feared until the fear thinned. She staged happenings in which she painted dots on naked bodies and opposed the Vietnam War. In 1966 she arrived uninvited at Venice and laid 1,500 mirrored balls on the grass as Narcissus Garden, offering them for sale at two dollars each until officials stopped her.

The hospital years and the second career

In 1973 she returned to Japan. In 1977 she moved, voluntarily, into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. She kept a studio nearby and worked every day. For years the New York career receded. The second career began when museums looked again at the 1960s and when the mirror rooms, first shown in 1965 as Phalli’s Field, met a public that wanted to stand inside an image and photograph it.

That popularity sat beside a harder fact. Kusama remained a patient. She kept making work about death, sex and repetition. She wrote novels and poems. She wore a red wig. The brand and the illness were not separate products. The studio’s last statement tried to hold both: eternal love, eternal soul, and a brush that did not stop.

What remains is the inventory. Museums hold nets, pumpkins, rooms and films. Auction houses hold price records. The hospital room is empty. The question her work always posed is unchanged. How many times do you have to repeat a shape before it stops being a threat and becomes a surface. She spent 97 years on that problem. The dots are still on the walls.