Yayoi Kusama
How Yayoi Kusama started her path to becoming an artist after writing to one of her heroes, Georgia O’Keefe.
Discipline: Painting, Sculpture, Performance Art
Yayoi Kusama was born to an affluent merchant family in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan in 1929. As a child, her mother was physically abusive and would also send her to spy on her father who would frequently have extramarital affairs. This would cause Yayoi mental anguish later in life. She embraced art and early age. All Kusama wanted to do was paint. However, her family’s plans were for her to marry, become a wife and the head of a household. As there was no future in painting for women at that time in Japan. She dreamed of leaving Japan. Not only because of her family troubles but also Japan’s conservative culture. Kusama described Japan at the time as, “too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women” (1). Yayoi had her sights on becoming an artist in America.
In a second-hand bookshop in Matsumoto, Kusama found a book of paintings by the American artist, Georgia O’Keefe. O’Keefe was the only American artist Yayoi knew anything about. She also heard from a friend that O’Keefe was the most famous painter in the United States. Yayoi would ride the train from Matsumoto to Shinjuku in Tokyo to the American embassy to go through their copy of Who’s Who and was ecstatic when she actually found Georgia O’Keefe’s mailing address. Kusama wrote a letter to O’Keefe of her desires to be a professional painter in America and enclosed some of her recent watercolor paintings. To her surprise, O’Keefe wrote back. O’Keefe let the young Kusama know how difficult it was to be an artist, especially a female artist. O’Keefe promised she would do everything that she could to help Yayoi out, but she was old and had retreated from the city to the desert of New Mexico. This was the first of many encouraging letters Yayoi would receive from O’Keefe. (2)
O’Keefe’s response inspired Kusama to find a distant relative to sponsor her to get into the United States. Her official purpose on her immigration papers was to have a solo art exhibition in Seattle. In Japan, It was against the law to transfer any significant amounts of yen to dollars let alone leave the country with them. When Kusama was preparing to leave Japan, she sowed the dollar bills into her dress and stuffed the others into the toes of her shoes. Her ultimate goal was to make it to New York as she believed it to be one of the world’s art epicenters. At the age of 27, she landed in Seattle. After a year in Seattle, she did just that and finally made it to New York City.
Yayoi described New York City as hell on Earth as she had tremendous difficulty there. She lived in abject poverty. Her studio windows were broken, and she used a discarded door she found out on the street as a bed and laid the only sheet she had on top of it. Dinner during this time would either be a handful of chestnuts from a friend or soup’s she would make with discarded fish heads along with the rotting outer leaves of lettuce the green grocer tossed out. Kusama said the only way she could tolerate the cold and hunger was to paint relentlessly as it was impossible to sleep (3). She suffered mental breakdowns and panic attacks. After being rushed to emergency on numerous occasions, the hospital strongly recommended that Yayoi go to a psychiatrist and potentially a mental institution.
To Yayoi’s surprise, Georgia O’Keefe would visit her in New York and determined to help her introduced Kusama to her own art dealer Edith Halpert. She kept painting her infinity net series. Which consisted of paintings of black dots enveloped by white nets. The paintings were large scale and repetitive. Out of the thousands of dots, Yayoi referenced that a single dot was herself. A single point in the universe. A single particle among billions. She carried one of her canvases of infinity net paintings 40 blocks for submission to be considered for the Whitney Annual. It didn’t resemble the Whitney of today as it was far more conservative back then. She was rejected and had to carry her canvas 40 blocks back to her studio. Through her introductions, she had her first solo show at the Brata Gallery and got some favorable reviews. Kusama made her first close friend in the art world, the conceptual artist and critic Donald Judd (4). Not only did he buy one of her pieces but wrote her a complimentary review. This show would open opportunities for other group exhibitions and shows in New York, Boston, and DC.
Kusama would continue to receive great reviews for her work. However, artists who copied her work would get more credit for her creative breakthroughs than she would. Yayoi had an exhibition at the Green Gallery, where she created soft sculptures. The art consisted of objects that were covered in phallic soft sculptures. Claes Oldenburg was part of the same show and was working with stiff paper mache at the time. Sewing to create artwork wasn’t seen as masculine which is why Oldenburg stayed away from it initially. After Yayoi, went to see one of Oldenburg’s new shows, he completely changed his approach and adopted soft-sculpture. Oldenburg’s wife and art assistant Pat, helped him sew his soft sculptures together. The influence was so blatant that Pat pulled Kusama aside and said, “Yayoi, Forgive us!” Oldenburg’s soft sculptures would gain critical acclaim and would launch his career as one of the first sculptor’s of the pop art movement (5).
Other artists, in addition to Oldenburg, found it irresistible to steal ideas from Kusama. This included Andy Warhol. But this isn’t as surprising as he built a career off of appropriation. At Yayoi’s solo New York show at the Gertrude Stein Gallery in 1963, her work titled: “Aggregation One Thousand Boats Show,” she displayed a boat that was covered in her soft sculptures and on the ceilings, and walls were 999 black and white images of the sculpture covering the room. It was Kusama’s first foray into creating immersive environments. According to Kusama, Warhol came to her show and exclaimed, “Yayoi, what is this? It’s fantastic!” Warhol would later paper the walls and ceiling with silkscreened cow head posters at the Leo Castelli Gallery (6).
By creating environments, Kusama made another breakthrough. A pioneering move. Which was to create entire rooms that were works of art. In the Instagram age, this is commonplace now. Building environments people can take selfies in. One of the more well-known ones being 29Rooms created by the online publisher Refinery29. For Kusama portraits weren’t the objective. Immersion into the art was. She extended her theme of infinity nets on canvas into infinity rooms. With space exploration and the various scientific discoveries that were in the media, people collectively became more aware of infinity. In March of 1966, she would make the debut of her piece “Peep Show” at the Castellane Gallery in New York. It was a room with carefully placed mirrors with openings you could put your head in into and feel a sense of infinity through the mirrored reflections. The mirrors were arranged in an octagon shape with colored electric lights. The lights felt like stars in the illusory infinite space. In the same year a few months later in October of 1966, Lucas Samaras made a similar mirrored room at the far more established PACE Gallery despite ever having used mirrors before. It appeared to be a blatant ripoff of Kusama’s work (7).
Yayoi made critical, creative breakthroughs in her work that other artists had copied and made part of their own shows. They’d be taken up by the art establishment and collectors while Yayoi was ignored. In the latter part of the decade, Kusama staged “Happenings” that were performance art pieces that became popular during the beat and hippie movements which involved sexual acts and nudity. The happenings were used sometimes for collective creative expression and other times for political protest. By 1972 Kusama would be listed in the book American Who’s Who. The same book in which in which she found Georgia O’Keefe’s contact details that began their mutual correspondence.
In 1973 Kusama’s health began to deteriorate. She was in Japan for a brief visit and checked herself into a hospital when she had an episode of anxiety and hallucinations. Her condition worsened, so she decided to stay in Japan. She checked herself back into the hospital in 1975 due to her flickering vision and hallucinations. By 1977 she would commit herself permanently to the hospital in Shinjuku. Right around the corner from her studio. She would leave the hospital only to work in her studio. Since her hospitalization, Kusama continued to produce art. According to Kusama, if it weren’t for art, she would have killed herself a long time ago (8).
In 1993 for the 45th Venice Biennale, she was officially invited to represent Japan. It was the first solo exhibition by a single artist at the Japanese Pavilion. Yayoi’s previous appearance at the Biennale was in 1966, uninvited. She is now exhibited in galleries worldwide and has had significant retrospectives including one at the MOMA in New York. There are long lines and wait-lists to see her infinity mirrored rooms at many galleries including the Broad in Los Angeles. A large of a portion of her works now reside in her hometown in the Matsumoto City Museum of Art.
Reference
1. Frank, Priscilla (9 February 2017). “Japanese Artist Yayoi Kusama Is About To Make 2017 Infinitely Better”. Huffington Post. Retrieved 11 March 2017.
2. Kusama, Yayoi. Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama. Tate Publishing, 2013. p.10.
3. Ibid. p. 15.
4. Ibid. p. 23.
5. Lenz, Heather, director. Kusama: Infinity. Magnolia Pictures, 2019.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Kusama, Yayoi. Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama. Tate Publishing, 2013. p.226.
Originally published at blog.viktorbezic.com.
