New Biography Encaptures Artist Yayoi Kusama's Life and Career

Often referred to as "the queen of polka dots", artist Yayoi Kusama's life backstories have always been veiled in mystery, while the huge pumpkins sculptures in her Infinity Room pieces have pierced the hearts of millions. With her iconic look—a distinctive red/orange bob, colorful clothing, often a replica of her works—she is known all over the world, and yet how did she leave rural Japan and become one of the most important figures in the world of art and fashion— remember the Yayoi Kusama x Louis Vuitton collaboration in 2012? In the book Yayoi Kusama, published by Laurence King as part of the Living Artists series, author Robert Shore dives deeply into the life of one of the most enigmatic so far legendary contemporary artists. This engaging and highly readable pocket biography of Kusama deconstructs this otherworldly character, revealing Kusama's difficult childhood in Japan, her years in New York in the 1960s with Andy Warhol and the Factory, and finally, how she overcame profound mental health struggles to become an art superstar whose exhibitions are the most important visited by any single living artist. L'OFFICIEL spoke to Shore on his discoveries about Kusama while writing the book.

L'OFFICIEL: If you had to list the five best discoveries you made throughout your research, what would they be?

Robert Stone: Certainly the connection with Warhol, the fact that since the '70s she has dedicated a lot to writing, especially prose but also poetry, her passion for fashion that dates back to the late '60s, which becomes a form of expression and self-affirmation. She even created her own fashion line which was sold at Bloomingdale's for a while. Then there is the fact that many of her performances feature a protest art form. And again, the discovery of the letter to President Nixon advising us to leave war aside and put love first is absolutely courageous and daring. And finally, there is her theatrical work, her theatrical and body painting performances. Absolutely innovative for the time.

L'O: What happens in the years she was in New York?

RS: The starting point was the realization of the fundamental intersection between her and Andy Warhol in the New York of the '60s, a fundamental decade for Yayoi, who in this period was also very inclined to talk about his art which is highly distinctive. It was the '60s that led her to success. She arrived in New York when Expressionism was depopulated and tried to go further. America and her contacts inspired her. She arrived in the U.S. at the end of the 1950s and it was a very contrary choice if we think about how the world was not globalized as it is today. She also explored minimalism and pop art even though her art cannot be called minimalist.

L'O: Can you tell us about the various stages of her career and explain when her mental health started to interfere in her art as well as in her life? Was it a turning point or is it a problem that had always been there and only worsened at a certain point?

RS: Her mental health has always been an important issue for her and she has always exercised tremendous self-control. But she has always tried to ensure that people could totally immerse themselves in her world through her art.

L'O: Let's talk about the extremely distinctive and avant-garde look for those times. Has she always had a red bob?

RS: I believe she has always tried to offer her work in a non-commercial way and her figure has always reflected this desire. Her look has always had a close connection with her private life. Her goal was to represent a work of art herself. I think there are a lot of similarities between her art and her personal look, particularly during the American period of the '60s where she was more minimal and less playful. The colorful helmet arrives in the period of affirmation. In New York, she had long hair and then short hair like a boy.

L'O: From the portrait you made of her, she turns out to be a rather daring artist but also a free woman who makes her voice heard, which is very interesting considering especially her origins.

RS: Yes, in Japanese society, women find it hard to express themselves, and even more so in those years. It was not easy to be a woman artist in a world populated by men. Even when she arrived in New York, she was fully aware that she was an outsider, but that didn't stop her, let alone frighten her. She greatly appreciated the psychedelic society and in general the community of artists that had been created in New York in the '60s. Yayoi has always gone against the grain when necessary, never betraying her true nature. For example, she has always fought against sexophobia, a legacy of her adolescence in Japan, which will later lead to the Naked Happenings organized at the end of the 1960s, pro-sex and pacifist works (as evidenced by the interventions against the war in Vietnam) that they will crown her "queen of the hippies" without ever being openly feminist.

L'O: Why is she obsessed with pumpkins?

RS: It always had to do with her personal life. During her youth, Kusama's hometown Matsumoto was unaffected by World War II and had abundant food supplies, especially her family, who owned farmland. The shapes of the pumpkins, which have always filled her warehouse, enchanted the girl. While pumpkins fed the population in wartime, they also feed the artist's muse. Kusama explores the concepts of repetition and infinity by placing mutant pumpkins in the mirror rooms, creating an eerie feeling that inhabits our minds. Kabocha pumpkins are part of Kusama's experience, they have become a vegetable alter-ego of the artist, who claimed to have found comfort in their colorful forms since she was a child.

L'O: What do you tell us about her relationships. She has been living in isolation for years now and little to nothing is known about her love life. Do we know if she dated anyone in the '60s?

RS: Yes, although the nature of her friendship with Donald Judd is not known for certain. If we had strolled through midtown Manhattan in 1962, we would have seen artists Yayoi Kusama and Donald Judd hauling a large armchair down the block. That piece of furniture found would become the basis for one of Kusama's earliest and most iconic sculptures: Accumulation No. 1 (1962), a massive form covered with padded phallus-shaped accents. The work became an example of Pop Art and a highlight of Kusama's recent successful retrospectives. It also represents a more subtle force in Kusama's practice: her friendship with the pioneer of minimalist sculpture. And then there are several stories that are talked about and Yayoi herself defines as platonic loves like the one with the artist Joseph Cornell, but I believe they weren't so platonic in those years.

In 1958, at the age of 29, Kusama escaped from Japan and from a family that oppressed her—with 60 kimonos, 2,000 drawings and paintings to sell, and a suitcase. She landed in New York, which, after a beginning made of hardships and a friendship with Andy Warhol, consecrated her as one of the most innovative artists of her time and as the queen of hippies and pacifism, an icon of the struggles against sexism and traditionalism, even if she will never be part of the feminist movement.

In that period, Kusama reached the heart of her artistic language and expanded it beyond the two-dimensional space of the canvas, starting to paint dot after dot, a creative process that she herself calls "obliteration," until it exploded in all its artistic potential. Until 1973, the year of her return to Japan, her production was intense, landing provocative and risque performances in which the human body became part of the work of art and becomes itself—through the body painting of which Kusama was a brilliant exponent in the 1960s—an artistic object to be enjoyed, becoming a distinctive sign of the artist.

After invading galleries and dominating the art scene in New York, Kusama found the courage to return to Japan in 1973 when episodes began that undermined her stability ("depersonalization", the psychiatrists told her), up to her voluntary stay in the Seiwa psychiatric hospital, where she attempted suicide. For almost twenty years, all trace of her was lost. No one from America to Japan spoke more of the audacity of the artist who, in the meantime, had transformed her fears and anxieties into abstract landscapes rich in color. In 1987, Japan rehabilitates her public image with a retrospective at the Kita-Kyushu Art Museum in Fukuoka. Two years later, it was the turn of the United States: the CICA of New York dedicated “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective” to her, curated by Alexandra Munroe and Bhupendra Karia. The event places Kusama in its rightful place in the history of contemporary art and in 1993 the exhibition moved to the Venice Biennale.

Today, in her nineties, Kusama lives by personal will in the Seiwa psychiatric hospital and paints almost daily.

In 1959, she created her first works in the Infinity Net series, large canvases almost ten meters long. In the 1960s, she devoted herself to the development of new works of art, for example, Accumulation or Sex Obsession. Since 1967, Kusama has created numerous provocative and risque performances by painting the participants' bodies with polka dots or letting them “enter” her works. In New York, in the artistic environment of Manhattan, Kusama had her studio in the same building where Larry Rivers, Claes Oldenburg, John Chamberlain, Donald Judd, and Joseph Cornell worked. Andy Warhol had his "factory" just a stone's throw away.

Kusama was the pioneer of painting "polka dots" or two-dimensional multicolored dots, on canvases and murals, as well as the naked bodies of men and women. This artistic expression influenced generations of painters, from Lichtenstein onwards. The "polka dots" finally culminated in the works of Damien Hirst.

Finally returning to Japan, starting in 1977, Kusama by personal choice took up accommodation in the Seiwa psychiatric hospital, where she always said she was comfortable and where she began to write surreal poems and novels. Works produced after her return to Japan are the "phallic gardens" and the protuberances (pustules, growths, humpbacks) of fabrics or other materials, which characterize paintings and objects, with an explicit phallic or vaginal sexual reference. Recently, the artist has continued to represent the infinite through sculptures and rooms accessible to visitors.

In 1993, she produced a dazzling hall of mirrors for the Venice Biennale with pumpkins inserted, which became her alter ego Infinity Mirror Room. From that moment, Kusama invented other works on commission, mostly giant flowers or colorful plants. Her works are exhibited in various important museums worldwide in permanent exhibitions, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Tate Modern in London, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. She made herself known to the general public for her collaboration with Peter Gabriel in the video "Love Town" (1994), in which all her obsessions—polka dots, nets, food, and sex—end up in the hypertrophic world of the former Genesis member's song.

A collaboration with Louis Vuitton arrived in 2012 thanks to Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton's artistic director, with whom she carried out one of the greatest artistic collaborations for the French Maison. Numerous items of clothing have been created that show the obsessive polka dots, very large and colorful. A line of Louis Vuitton bags was also created, where the most iconic models were taken up in which the classic Monogram canvas and replaced with the much more prestigious Monogram Vernis Dots Infinity leather. Instead, other bags have undergone a more imaginative restyling where the handles, the top, and the bottom have been made in Dots Infinity patent leather, while the central part is in Monogram nylon.

Presently, her work is in the collections of some of the most prestigious museums around the world: from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Tate Modern in London, from the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the city where the artist lives and works today. Numerous sculptures, in the shape of gigantic plants and flowers, can be found at the Fukuoka Municipal Museum of Art and Matsumoto City Museum of Art in Japan; Eurolille in Lille, France, and Beverly Hills City Council in Los Angeles. In 2012, an exhibition tour from Paris to Madrid, starting from the Tate Modern in London, arrived at the Whitney Museum in New York.