Yayoi Kusama

From the Files

+ In 2006, Yayoi Kusama’s Golden Macaroni Jacket, 1965, brought $66,000 at Sotheby’s. A little over a year later, the same piece sold for $148,000 at the house’s London salesroom.

+ In May 2005, No. B, 3, 1962 set Kusama’s then record when the work, made from egg crates and upholstery stuffing on canvas, sold for $1.2 million at Christie’s. The firm’s Robert Manley observes: "It was a fantastic minimal conceptual object, and it predated sculpture that would come later by artists like Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman."

+ A lesser-known aspect of the artist’s output are the products — watches, hair-pins, paperweights — that she began making in 1969. Kusama’s studio continues to produce merchandise, which, like the artist Takashi Murakami’s wares, is sold in gift shops of Japanese museums. As curator Laura Hoptman explains, "Murakami wouldn’t be Murakami without Kusama."

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With her 80th birthday on March 22, the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is in the midst of a glorious late-career moment. Through June 8, an exhibition documenting her oeuvre from the 1960s to the present is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia. On April 16, Gagosian — Kusama’s primary U.S. representative since she left her longtime dealer Robert Miller Gallery in 2007 — will open a sprawling show of her recent work in New York. And just this past November, Kusama’s steadily climbing auction prices culminated in a record $5,794,500 (est. $2.5-$3.5 million), fetched at Christie’s New York by one of her first "Infinity Net" works, the 1959 No. 2, a grand, six-by-nine-foot oil patterned with dense whorls of white paint. That considerable sum, paid by the Manhattan private dealer Philippe Ségalot, is also one of the highest bids ever earned by a living female artist, second only to the £3,177,250 ($6,343,082) achieved by the painter Marlene Dumas last July at Sotheby’s London.

Not bad for an artist who virtually disappeared from the international scene for two decades and whose home base since the early ’70s has been a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. Although she suffers from a lifelong mental illness characterized by hallucinations and obsessive thoughts, Kusama has engineered her career with great savvy, even managing to mine her affliction for art’s sake. The thread uniting her diverse body of work, which spans virtually every medium — painting, drawing, print, sculpture and performance, video and installation art — is her use of repetition, pattern and accumulation. This stylistic signature is most consistently expressed in tightly clustered net and dot motifs, whose origins Kusama traces to a set of troubling delusions she began having as a 10-year-old.

Born in Matsumoto City, Japan, in 1929, Kusama entered the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts in 1948. There she studied Nihonga painting, a traditional Japanese style originating in the late 19th century. By 1950, she was depicting abstracted natural forms in watercolor, gouache and oil, primarily on paper. During this period, she initiated a correspondence with Georgia O’Keeffe, the first woman to receive a solo show, in 1946, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In 1958, Kusama moved to Manhattan hoping to emulate O’Keeffe’s success at the center of the international postwar art scene.

The following year she showed her "Infinity Net" series at the Brata Gallery, in the East Village, where the works caught the attention of Frank Stella and her close friend Donald Judd. In fact, it was from this show that Judd purchased the record work, No. 2. At the time, "very few artists were doing purely abstract monochromatic paintings. She took the energy and compositional randomness of Abstract Expressionism one step further and well before figures like Agnes Martin did," says Alexandra Munroe, the senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim in New York. "There was also a deep Surrealist notion, because her paintings were so embedded in this psychic portrait of herself. And then there was the other part that makes her completely unique, which is the feminism involved. She conceived these as though she were imprisoned by these infinity nets in her own brain."

So consumed was Kusama by the concept of infinity that she began to apply the notion of endless repetition to other mediums, as in her "Accumulations" sculptures: household objects — kitchen pans, shoes and chairs — that she covered with phallic protrusions made from stuffed fabric. She also created the related series "Sex Obsession," consisting of furniture upholstered in the same manner, and "Food Obsession," for which she glued dried pasta on everything from handbags to mannequins. In 1964 she brought these pieces together in a room-sized installation at the Castellane Gallery, in New York, where she lined the walls with her "Infinity Net" paintings. By the end of the decade, Kusama had begun to use very public places, such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the pool of MoMA’s sculpture garden, as stages for "happenings" in which posses of young dancers would undress to serve as living canvases for the artist’s polka-dot paintings.