Yayoi Kusama dies at 97 after a life spent painting through hallucination

Yayoi Kusama died on 14 August in a Tokyo hospital. She was 97. The Yayoi Kusama Museum and the Yayoi Kusama Foundation made the death public in late August. The cause was multiple organ failure. The museum said she continued to paint until the last days and never set the brush aside. No other medical detail was released.

Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, in Nagano prefecture, into a family that sold seeds and plants. She described hallucinations from childhood: dots and nets that covered rooms, dresses, ceilings. She painted them because, she said, repeating the thing that frightened her was a way to hold it down. That method became a career. Infinity Net canvases, some of them room-sized, came first in New York after she left Japan in 1958. Soft phallic sculptures, mirrored rooms, polka-dot pumpkins and public “obliteration” performances followed.

New York in the 1960s put her next to, and often ahead of, the men later filed under minimalism and pop. She organised happenings, wrote to President Richard Nixon against the Vietnam War, and watched dealers and museums give the larger prizes to neighbours who had walked through her studio. In 1973 she returned to Japan. In 1977 she chose to live in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. She kept a studio across the street and worked there for the rest of her life. The hospital was not a retreat from the market. It was the address from which she ran a second act that the first act never had.

The second act was enormous. Infinity Mirror Rooms became timed-ticket events at the Hirshhorn, Tate Modern and a circuit of other museums. Visitors queued for minutes inside a box of lights and mirrors and left with a photograph. The same years produced pumpkin sculptures that sold for more than a million dollars and, in 2022, the 1959 painting Untitled (Nets), which brought $10.5 million. David Zwirner, her dealer for 15 years, called her the most famous living artist in the world at the time of her death. The Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo in 2017. A yellow pumpkin on the quay at Naoshima, first installed in 1994 and remade in 2022 after a storm, is now one of the most photographed objects in Japanese public art.

She wrote novels and poems as well as painting. She wore a red wig in late public appearances and sat for portraits in clothes covered with the same dots that covered the work. The look was a brand and a continuation of the childhood method: put the pattern on the body so the pattern cannot swallow the body whole.

The late announcement, twelve days after the death, is consistent with how she managed privacy in the hospital years. The work is already in museums that will not take it down. What changes now is the living artist who could still walk across the street and add another net to a canvas. That walk has ended. The rooms, the pumpkins and the nets stay up, and they will keep drawing the queues she trained a global audience to join.