Yayoi Kusama's Fame Eclipsed Her Art

In 1988, when I met her, Yayoi Kusama had been living in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo for over a decade, and was nearly forgotten by the art world in New York. As a graduate student researching postwar Japanese art, I had been invited to curate the opening exhibition at a new institution in New York, the Center for International Contemporary Arts (CICA). I chose Ms. Kusama, with the ambition to wrest her from obscurity. When she died last month, 37 years later, Ms. Kusama — in her life and her art — was obscured, paradoxically, by too much fame. There has been an outpouring of tributes to her after her death, at 97, in Tokyo. Everyone notes how she had a role in the Minimalism and Pop Art movements of the 1960s avant-garde when she lived in New York City before moving back to Tokyo in 1973. And they mention her late-in-life career revival, with record-smashing auction prices as a female artist, the crowds lined up at her mirrored immersive installations and the signature range of polka-dot luxury goods she designed — twice — for Louis Vuitton. Ms. Kusama's madness is part of her legend, but mental illness is not artistry and its outcome is not always art. Writings on Ms. Kusama — including my own — see her work through the lens of a psychological distortion. This is fair, but it is not the distortion that made the artist. The fame of Ms. Kusama's later decades has eclipsed our appreciation of the fierce rage and the original genius that drove her to make incessant art — and to make it incessantly. It ignores how, from her early days, male artists commandeered her ideas. Her work seemed to have inspired Claes Oldenburg's bulbous, sewn-and-stuffed sculptures, Andy Warhol's repeating images as wallpaper and Lucas Samaras's interactive mirrored chamber. I first met Ms. Kusama in a coffee shop in Tokyo. I had come with CICA's director, Bhupendra Karia, and its research head, Reiko Tomii. Ms. Kusama walked fast and a little stooped, like a penguin. Her eyes were intense; she wore heavy lipstick, a bit of eyeliner, some rouge. Her brow was deeply furrowed. She leaned forward as she spoke, her rapid-fire English skipping verbs and tenses as she recited stories, betrayals, triumphs, beliefs. Occasionally, she would look up at us and smile as if a bird had alighted in her view. In these flashes, I would see her beauty. Her Japanese was equally staccato. It was barely conversational. But she always spoke with absolute conviction. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.