Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese outsider artist who reached superstar status after decades living in a psychiatric hospital, has died aged 97. Kusama died in a Tokyo hospital on 14 August, her studio announced in a statement on her website on Thursday. Yet she had pioneered many of her enduring themes as a young artist in the 1960s before fading into temporary obscurity.
As well as being a sculptor and painter, Kusama put on numerous performance pieces throughout the hippy era that saw her name attached to scandal. She staged “body festivals” with naked performers painted in polka dots and once wrote to US president Richard Nixon offering to sleep with him in return for an end to the Vietnam war. News of such events appalled her conservative family back home.
Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, enduring an unhappy childhood at the hands of an abusive mother and philandering father. Her wealthy family managed plant nurseries and Kusama would sit and draw the flowers despite her mother’s frequent attempts to stop her. As a child, Kusama began experiencing hallucinations, in which the flowers would swarm around and talk to her.
Her coping mechanism was to draw what she saw. During the second world war, 13-year-old Kusama was conscripted to produce fabric for Japanese army parachutes. She later studied nihonga, a traditional Japanese style of painting, in Kyoto, but grew frustrated with its limitations.
Rejecting her planned future of an arranged marriage and children, Kusama left Japan for New York in 1958. There, she fell in with the artist and theorist Donald Judd and made a breakthrough with her “infinity net” paintings – vast fields of impastoed polka dots that stretched across the canvas. In 1962, she sold her first of these to the artists Frank Stella and Judd for $75.
In 2014, her White No 28 sold for $7.1m (£5.7m) at auction, a record at the time for a living female artist. In 1963, Kusama started making “soft sculptures” – pieces of furniture and other objects, such as ladders, covered with white, fabric-stuffed phallic shapes. They were, she said, her attempt to heal her disgust around sex, which she had been brought up to believe was dirty and shameful.
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