Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist who went from psychiatric hospital resident to global Instagram sensation, has died at the age of 97. Her studio announced the death on Thursday, revealing that she passed away in a Tokyo hospital on 14 August.
In a statement, her studio said: 'Throughout an extraordinary lifetime devoted entirely to artistic creation, Kusama pursued an internationally acclaimed career as a pioneering avant-garde artist whose creative practice encompassed visual art, performance, fiction, and poetry.' They added that she 'continued to paint until her final days, never setting aside her brush, and continued exploration of forever love and eternal soul.'
Kusama, instantly recognizable by her bright red bobbed wig, became famous for psychedelic color schemes and mirrored installations that made her a hit in the selfie age. But she had pioneered these themes in the 1960s before fading into obscurity, because apparently the world wasn't ready for an artist who painted dots and offered to sleep with Richard Nixon to end the Vietnam War.
Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama had an unhappy childhood with an abusive mother and a philandering father. She began hallucinating as a child, seeing flowers swarm and talk to her; her coping mechanism was to draw them. During World War II, at 13, she was conscripted to produce fabric for army parachutes. She studied nihonga in Kyoto but rejected her planned future of arranged marriage and children, leaving for New York in 1958.
In New York, she fell in with Donald Judd and made a breakthrough with her 'infinity net' paintings. In 1962, she sold her first to Frank Stella and Judd for $75. In 2014, her White No 28 sold for $7.1m (£5.7m) at auction, a record for a living female artist at the time. Not a bad return on investment.
Kusama also made 'soft sculptures' covered with fabric-stuffed phallic shapes, which she said were her attempt to heal her disgust around sex. Despite working within pop art and minimalism, she wasn't embraced by the art world, and always maintained that her ideas were appropriated by white male artists, including Andy Warhol.
Her work centered on the infinite and 'self-obliteration,' inspired by her hallucinations. At the 1966 Venice Biennale, she presented Narcissus Garden, a 'lake' of 1,500 reflective balls, and began selling them for $2 each under the banner 'Your narcissism for sale.' The biennale shut it down.
She staged controversial happenings, including New York's first 'homosexual wedding' in 1968 and washing a 'dirty' Soviet flag outside the UN to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia. She also had an obsessive relationship with Joseph Cornell, and after his death in 1972, her mental health deteriorated. In 1977, she checked herself into a Tokyo psychiatric hospital, where she lived permanently, working daily in her nearby studio.
Interest in Kusama waned by the early 90s, but recognition finally arrived. In 1993, she created a mirrored room filled with pumpkin sculptures for the Venice Biennale's Japanese pavilion. Pumpkins had been a recurring motif since she first saw one with her grandfather at age 11 and it seemed to speak to her. Her installations, like Infinity Mirror Room: Phalli's Field from 1965, became global sensations, perfect for Instagram. Ironically, in 2017, an exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC was temporarily closed after someone damaged a work while taking a selfie.
Kusama received retrospectives at MoMA in 1998, Tate Modern in 2012, and the Hirshhorn in 2017. Tickets sold out, and fans queued for hours for 30-second experiences. Yet she always considered herself an outsider. 'I cannot imagine how I will be classified after my death,' she once said. 'It feels good to be an outsider.'