Yayoi Kusama Was the Avant-Garde Radical Who Became a Pop Icon

On June 4, 1962, the Green Gallery in New York opened the most prophetic of group shows. It gave Andy Warhol his earliest exposure as a pop artist, with an image of dollar bills that was his first silk-screened work. In front of that lay a featureless gray slab by sculptor Robert Morris; it counts as one of the first examples of minimalism. And off to one side was a sofa that the New York Times’ review said had “broken out frighteningly in what look like thousands of blanched frankfurters.”

They were cloth penises, in fact, unmentionable in the era’s press, and they worked as one of the first of the great 1960s provocations of Yayoi Kusama, whose death at the age of 97 was announced Thursday.

In her long life, she achieved something I’m not sure I’ve come across elsewhere: two very different moments of stardom, almost as though she’d been two different artists.

Back in 1962, the Times review didn’t even mention Warhol and Morris because Kusama, still in her first artistic incarnation, was so obviously more worthy of note.

Born in Japan in 1929 into wealth but also into profound familial dysfunction Kusama had moved to the United States by 1957. Within barely 18 months, vast canvases covered edge to edge in lines and dots had won her a place on New York’s cutting edge. Those “Infinity Nets,” a precursor to her late-career “Infinity Rooms,” counted as early steps in American art’s move beyond abstract expressionism. (They might have encouraged the allover patterns of Warhol’s early silk-screens, and possibly Agnes Martin’s first grids.)

A few years later, when Kusama came up with her phallic “Accumulations” her “frankfurters” came to cover a rowboat, an ironing board, shoes those counted as some of the earliest feminist art, depicting a world infected by maleness.

And then, earlier than most of her peers, Kusama somehow recognized that the coming counterculture was calling for more than just impressive objects. Several years before Warhol had turned his eccentric public persona into one of his most striking creations, Kusama was already there: She took pains to be in the shot when her work was photographed, sometimes posing nude and covered in dots. Her “Infinity Nets” helped sell her as a noteworthy public figure, as much as her celebrity helped the paintings sell as worthwhile works of art.

As the decade wore on, Kusama began to gather other people into her avant-garde performance of self, now finding a home in the new ’60s “youthquake.” She became ever more famous for spectacles sometimes close to orgies in which she would paint her trademark dots onto the naked bodies of the hippie generation.

Kusama’s rise was not blind luck. From the moment she decided to leave Japan, she had a gimlet-eyed focus on art-world success. Already by 1965, a Japanese magazine could describe her as a dedicated experimentalist who had thrown herself into New York’s “dizzy whirl of avant-garde activities.” Before long she was conquering Europe as well, eager to be part of contemporary art at its most extreme.

“Kusama was intuiting, assimilating and giving shape to important, potentially generative cultural tendencies as they were emerging,” wrote Lynn Zelevansky, who curated the first retrospective of Kusama’s 1960s work.

And then, after moving back to Tokyo for good in the early 1970s, Kusama had a relapse of the mental illness she’d always suffered from. She checked herself into the private asylum where she lived for what accounted for most of the second half of her life; the international art world barely heard from her for a good 15 years. By 1984, a rare article about her could say she was “only vaguely remembered.”

When she reemerged in 1989, it was as Kusama 2.0.

Her art didn’t necessarily change its look or feel — dots continued to proliferate over objects, now including elaborately fabricated sculptures of pumpkins and flowers — but all of a sudden her illness became the major focus of her reception. That 1984 article was titled “The Evolution of Obsession: Yayoi Kusama’s Psychosomatic Art.” Five years later, when Kusama had her first major New York outing in decades, Times critic Roberta Smith quoted an essay that described Kusama as the only psychiatric patient “to pay her medical bills with income earned from work in residence”; the words “Yayoi Kusama lives part time in a mental hospital” were displayed on the page in large type.

Smith linked Kusama’s work to the “intense personal visions of outsider art.” Once so eager to play a role deep inside the art world, at its most esoteric, Kusama had taken up a position on the outside instead.

Any artist’s work depends on who they innately are: An inborn skill at drawing spurred the realism of Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt, while Pablo Picasso’s roots in the sexist culture of old Spain bred the misogynist moments in his art. Kusama’s achievements had always been shaped in part by her illness, but what had counted in the 1960s was the interest and importance of the art that came out of her psyche, and the meaning it carried in the art ecosystem.

In the ’90s, the mental illness itself seemed to become a selling point. And that vastly widened Kusama’s appeal, since people and sickness are more inherently compelling, to a wider audience, than avant-garde attempts to move art to new places.

In the later years of her life, Kusama’s touring shows drew millions of visitors and she was one of the most popular living artists in the world.

Much of that could be attributed to the growing appeal of her “Infinity Rooms.” Those are tight spaces, mirrored on all sides, to which visitors are admitted one at a time, to see themselves reflected into space, ad infinitum. (And, inevitably, to snap a photo to post on social media.)

When the first “Infinity Room” was installed in a New York gallery, in 1965, it put Kusama’s work in touch with the visual effects of op art, which everyone was keen on then. But that represented just one of the many directions her work was taking, and was less noteworthy, or important, than her sex-themed work. Then, in the 1990s, as her new outsider persona was taking over, her mirror rooms began to take center stage. Both that persona and the rooms that seemed to reflect it were easy to grasp by the wider public.

As a critic, I’ve been able to spend many a minute surrounded by Kusama’s mirrors. That’s been fun, but I can’t say it generated a lot of deep thoughts about life or art. And I can’t imagine that most visitors take away much more during their allotted 30 seconds, often after spending hours standing in line.

Mirror rooms give a tiny moment of easy “madness” — or what we think madness might feel like, according to our culture’s cliches. Kusama’s more recent paintings point to similar cliches, replacing the elegance and rigor of her early “Infinity Nets” with wacky doodles and goofy faces, as though she were embracing the image of herself as an outsider.

And being an outsider, especially to the “serious” art world, helped her climb deep inside pop culture and its commodity cult. Louis Vuitton contracted her to help sell its luxury goods, filling its Fifth Avenue windows with a Kusama robot all covered in dots. She dotted up cans for Coca-Cola and watches for Casio.

And being an outsider, especially to the “serious” art world, helped her climb deep inside pop culture and its commodity cult. Louis Vuitton contracted her to help sell its luxury goods, filling its Fifth Avenue windows with a Kusama robot all covered in dots. She dotted up cans for Coca-Cola and watches for Casio.