Yayoi Kusama, who in her Japanese adolescence had to sew parachutes for the Imperial Army, landed in 1950s New York as an unidentified provocative object. Actually, she arrived in Seattle, but the veteran Georgia O’Keeffe, who kindly responded to her letters, wisely advised her to move to the Big Apple. There she did not go unnoticed, but she did not achieve great success. Among other things because, according to her, Andy Warhol stole a lot of her ideas.
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The well-off family that gave her an unhappy childhood in Matsumoto and later failed to keep her in the corset of Kyoto – where she studied – watched with growing horror her American scandals. Theoretically supported by the minimalist Donald Judd, Yayoi Kusama paired platonically with another artist, Joseph Cornell. If she was his objet trouvé, he was her sentimental alibi. “We were complementary,” she would say years later, “he was impotent and sex disgusted me.”
The latter was no obstacle to spending much of her time sewing hundreds of plush penises, with polka dots or without, for her work “Field of Phalli” (1965). Call it psychomagic. Both the phalli and the polka dots remained very present in subsequent works, including other “soft sculptures.” She also liked to paint polka dots on naked men and women, encouraging them to practice free love, in performances between the U.S. and the Netherlands. The latter country turned out to be more receptive to her proposals with their butts in the air.
An officiant in the era of psychedelia and hippies, she cultivated pop art and op art and had the equanimity to protest both against the Vietnam War – she offered Nixon to sleep with her if he ended it – and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In response to this, she placed a washing machine in front of the UN headquarters and put a dirty USSR flag inside it.
Although the Venice Biennale did not invite her to its program, she showed up anyway with her “Narcissus Garden.” In a kimono and surrounded by 1,500 silver balls, which she sold for 200 liras each, until they kicked her out.
Her mental health, which was already delicate, worsened after Cornell’s death in 1972, which precipitated her definitive return to Japan a year later. She left behind a groundbreaking legend, but artistic recognition below her intuition and talent, perhaps because she was Asian and a woman. Earlier she had once again been ahead of her time by officiating as a priestess a mock homosexual wedding in New York, forty years before it was legal.
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Japan in the seventies finished sinking her, and at the end of that decade she voluntarily entered a psychiatric center that proposed art as a form of healing. Painting and creating daily saved her from suicide, as she would later acknowledge. Her star had faded. No one could have imagined that, fifteen years later, she would be reclaimed by a new generation and reach levels of admiration – and valuation – much greater than in her New York prime.
The recognitions, inside and outside Japan – where she became the first woman to receive the Praemium Imperiale – were followed by more than just an artistic resurrection. Nearing 65, when others retire, she retraced the path from oblivion to climb the steps of consecration. See a solo exhibition at the MoMA in New York or, a few years later, her show in London, with which the Tate Modern broke its visitor record.
Yayoi Kusama turned out to be not only more transgressive and fun than most of the sacred cows – all men – of her pop generation. She also revealed herself as a visionary artist who anticipated the future, with shapes, colors, and motifs that have maintained their freshness, while other avant-gardists became stiff. Hence Louis Vuitton went looking for her. Hence, more recently, Instagrammers line up to photograph themselves in front of her Pumpkin, on the art island of Naoshima, or in front of other giant sculptures of hers, on several continents.
The artist, who passed away on August 14 in a Tokyo hospital at the age of 97, continued painting until her last days. Yayoi Kusama had more than enough time to see the museum dedicated to her work and figure in Shinjuku, one of the youngest and most restless neighborhoods of Tokyo, which was also the location of her psychiatric hospital.
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