Yayoi Kusama (1929-2026): Heretical, fearless, brilliant and anti-“I”

During the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, a Japanese artist sent U.S. President Richard Nixon an open letter offering him a night of sex in exchange for an immediate end to the conflict. The provocative gesture was only one of the ways Yayoi Kusama challenged convention.

Kusama died in Tokyo on Aug. 14 at the age of 97, leaving behind the mark of one of the first artists from outside the Euro-American world to conquer the postwar international art scene. She was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano prefecture, into a prosperous family that cultivated crops.

Her early surroundings fed directly into her later work. Greenhouse seeds, bulbs and flowers gave her the organic forms and repeated patterns that dominated her art. At 13, wartime conscription forced her to sew military parachutes in a basement factory while living under the constant fear of bombing. The discipline she developed through sewing later became the foundation for her textile sculptures.

Her childhood also carried a deep trauma. Kusama’s mother forced her to secretly watch her father’s sexual infidelities, creating a lifelong aversion to the male body. Her psychological distress began producing hallucinations. In her 2002 autobiography, “Infinity Net,” she described looking at a red floral tablecloth, raising her eyes and seeing the pattern spread across the room, covering the ceiling, windows, her body and the entire universe.

She called this dissolution of the self “self-obliteration” and made it central to her philosophy. After studying Nihonga, traditional Japanese painting, in Kyoto in 1948, she grew frustrated with academic conservatism. Encouraged by the American painter Georgia O’Keeffe and supported by the American Cultural Center in Tokyo, she moved to New York in 1958. A year later, she made an explosive debut at Greenwich Village’s Brata Gallery with five nearly identical white paintings titled “Net.” By 1962, critics had embraced her work, and she was exhibiting alongside emerging figures such as Andy Warhol while creating hundreds of stuffed fabric phalluses to cover furniture and objects, works she called “Soft Sculptures.”