Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama dies at age 97

Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist known for her polka-dot paintings, pumpkin sculptures, and immersive "Infinity Mirror Rooms," has died at the age of 97. Her company announced her death on Thursday, stating that she passed away from multiple organ failure at a hospital in Tokyo on August 14. The statement noted, "Until the very end, she never put down her paintbrush, continuing to explore eternal love and the soul." Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Kusama had a troubled childhood marked by family conflict. She began drawing as a child, channeling the hallucinations she experienced into vibrant art featuring dots, nets, and infinity motifs. In a 2017 interview, she stated, "I still see hallucinations even now. Dots come flying everywhere – on my dress, the floor, things I’m carrying, throughout the house, the ceiling. And I paint them." After studying art in Japan, Kusama moved to the United States in the late 1950s, quickly gaining recognition in New York’s avant-garde scene with her net paintings, soft sculptures, and body painting events protesting the Vietnam War. She returned to Japan in 1973 and voluntarily checked into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she remained for the rest of her life, being driven each morning to a small studio nearby to continue her work. Repetitive motifs, often resembling netting, swirls, or worms, were her trademark, with dots prominently featured on her canvases and in her installations. Kusama once wrote, "Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos." In her later years, she became an art celebrity, partnering with fashion houses like Louis Vuitton, and her illustrations appeared on various licensed products. As her fame grew, her international exhibitions attracted large crowds, and her works commanded high prices, with one painting, Untitled (Nets) (1959), selling for $10.5 million in 2022. In 2016, she received the Order of Culture, Japan’s highest honor for artists. David Zwirner, an art dealer who represented Kusama for 15 years, remarked that she "was without a doubt the most famous living artist in the world" at the time of her passing, adding that "Kusama’s art influenced the histories of minimalism, pop art, and performance art."