Yayoi Kusama dies at 97; her studio says she painted until the last days

Yayoi Kusama died in a Tokyo hospital on 14 August. She was 97. The Yayoi Kusama Museum and the Yayoi Kusama Foundation posted the news on 27 August. Al Jazeera, citing the companies, reported multiple organ failure. The official notice did not list a cause. It said she kept painting until the final days and never set the brush aside.

Kusama was born on 22 March 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano, the youngest child in a family that ran plant nurseries. She described hallucinations of dots and nets from childhood and used them as the grammar of her work. She studied nihonga in Kyoto, left for Seattle in 1957, and reached New York in 1958 with encouragement from Georgia O'Keeffe.

New York, then the hospital

In New York she painted the Infinity Nets, vast fields of small arcs with no centre. She covered furniture with stuffed phallic forms in the Accumulation series. She staged happenings in which she painted dots on naked bodies and argued against the Vietnam War. She knew Donald Judd. She was often broke. By the early 1970s the New York moment had closed.

She returned to Japan and, in 1977, moved voluntarily into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she lived and worked for the rest of her life. The studio stayed nearby. From the late 1980s the museums came back. In 1993 she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale with Mirror Room (Pumpkin). The Infinity Mirror Rooms, first tried in 1965 with Phalli's Field, became the work that queues formed for.

The late crowd

A 2024-25 show at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne drew 570,537 visitors, the most attended ticketed exhibition in that museum's history. The touring retrospective that closed at Museum Ludwig in Cologne this month drew 480,335 visitors, a house record there. It opens at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam on 11 September and now reads as a memorial. Tate Modern's Infinity Mirror Rooms run in 2021-24 was that museum's most visited exhibition.

Untitled (Nets), from 1959, sold for about $10.5 million in May 2022. In 2023 her work took $190.5 million at auction across salerooms. David Zwirner, her dealer for 15 years, called her the most famous living artist in the world at the time of her death.

She never married. She wrote novels and poems as well as painting, sculpting and building rooms. The red wig and the dots became a public uniform. The private engine was repetition as a way to blunt fear. "By continually reproducing the forms of things that terrify me," she said, "I am able to suppress the fear."

KUSAMA's POP at her Tokyo museum runs through 30 August as scheduled. The Amsterdam hang will be the first large survey she will not see. The rooms still work without her. The question they pose is the same one she posed in 1965: how much of the self remains when the image repeats without end.