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."

Yayoi Kusama Georgia O'Keeffe Frank Stella Donald Judd Marlene Dumas Phillips de Pury Makes Its (Small) Mark The Second Sex (at Auction, Anyway) A Showdown for Doig at Christie’s

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

While Kusama’s vintage material is finally receiving its critical and commercial due, her new work is a harder sell. According to Meier, the early pieces bring 8 to 10 times the amount her current examples fetch. It appears, however, that this price scale is being reevaluated: A 2006 acrylic on fiberglass-reinforced plastic pumpkin earned $264,000, the top price for one of her sculptures, at Sotheby’s in March 2007, and a later "Infinity Net," The Galaxy I Saw in My Dream, which dates to 1993, earned 55 million yen ($537,949) at the Tokyo-based Est-Ouest Auctions in April 2008.

Gagosian director Louise Neri believes that the true market value of the monumental paintings Kusama is actively producing now has yet to be determined. (Kusama is "a fragile person," says Neri, but she leaves her clinic daily to work with a small team of assistants at her nearby studio.) "In recent years few major contemporary works have come up at auction, although there have been several early pieces that have fetched encouragingly high prices," Neri observes, adding that European buyers are more receptive to Kusama’s newer work than American ones. The gallery hopes to change that with its April show, which will contain the artist’s latest "Infinity Net" paintings; several sculptural pieces, including glossy hand-painted pumpkins made from fiberglass-reinforced plastic; and paintings that Neri cryptically promises will be "quite a surprise." Prices range from $200,000 to over $1 million, depending mainly on size.

But there will always be that lust among Kusama collectors for the old. As Manley says, "There’s a sense that in the late 1950s she realized all the ideas that she’ll be exploring for the rest of her career — that those early ones are really the first spark of genius." "Artist Dossier: Yayoi Kusama" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's March 2009 Table of Contents.