Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama was born on 22 March 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano prefecture, Japan, the fourth child of a seed-merchant family. She began hallucinating around the age of ten: poppy fields whose flowers spoke to her, tablecloth patterns that multiplied and covered her. Her mother, authoritarian, tore up her drawings. Kusama drew anyway, in secret, hundreds of times the same pumpkin from the family's vegetable garden. The pumpkin became her lifelong motif.

After studies at the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts, she wrote in 1955 to Georgia O'Keeffe asking for advice. O'Keeffe replied. Kusama left Japan in 1957, landed in Seattle and then New York in 1958. She was 29, broke, and invisible to the New York art scene. Her studio on East 19th Street was tiny. She painted at night, in series, her Infinity Net works: 5-meter canvases entirely covered with small white arcs that form a net with neither beginning nor end. The first show at Brata Gallery in 1959 drew the attention of Donald Judd and Frank Stella.

In the 1960s she multiplied the performances: the Naked Happenings in Central Park (1968), the Aggregation Sculptures (sofas covered with stuffed phalluses), the first Mirror Rooms (rooms entirely lined with mirrors, peopled with dots). She became a figure of the counterculture, exhibited at the Japanese pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 1966 without official authorization. But she did not sell. Andy Warhol took her ideas without crediting her (Kusama said so and the chronology backs it up), Lucas Samaras likewise. She returned to Japan in 1973, broken.

She moved in 1977 into à Tokyo psychiatric hospital where she still lives, and works at the studio across the street. Her global return began in 1989 with a retrospective at the Center for International Contemporary Arts in New York, then at the Venice Biennale in 1993 where she représented Japan. Tate Modern gave her a retrospective in 2012, the Hirshhorn Museum in 2017. Today her Infinity Mirror Rooms draw multi-hour queues in every museum that hosts them. The Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo opened in 2017.

A Kusama print lives in a bright room. The black dot on yellow or red on white asks for smooth walls, no gallery wall to dilute it. A thin light oak frame or raw frameless mount suits better than an ornate frame. It belongs in a contemporary living room or a child's bedroom: the palette is joyful, the obsessive motif within everyday view.