Marlene Wagman-Geller

“I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland.”

      Artists and eccentricities go together: Vincent van Gogh gave his severed ear as a present to a prostitute; Virginia Woolf heard birds sing in ancient Greek, Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a bat. And eccentricity on steroids describes the pop art, polka-dot princess.

      Remarkably, Yayoi Kusama, who has spent her life battling the windmill of conventionality, was a product of tradition-bound Japan. Her family lived in the rural, mountainous Matsumoto, where her wealthy father owned the region’s largest nursery. The Kusama home was a stranger to happiness. Her mother harbored fury against her husband and sent her daughter to spy on him and his current conquest. She vented her rage on Yayoi. 

     To counteract her misery, Yayoi sketched flowers that transformed into endless dots; moreover, voices wafted from the nursery. She recalled, “I had thought that only humans could speak, so I was surprised the violets were using words. I was so terrified my legs began shaking.” The hallucinations haunted her childhood. 

      To obliterate the horror that ricocheted in her head, Yayoi sketched repetitive patterns. Art served as therapy, later termed “art-medicine.” She continued her passion even though her mother, who she describes as “an aggressive person,” destroyed her work. Affirmation arrived at age eleven when she won first prize for her painting of a pumpkin. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, a factory conscripted her to produce fabrics for parachutes. During the night, she worked on her canvasses, sometimes producing seventy watercolors before she slept.

    As a teenager, Yayoi and her mother reached a compromise: Yayoi could attend the Kyoto School of Arts and Crafts as long as she also enrolled in etiquette classes to learn marital skills. Yayoi was a no-show for the etiquette classes and hated her art classes that focused on Nihonga, a traditional and highly rule-bound form of Japanese painting. What did pique her interest was a book by Georgia O’Keeffe, and the fledging painter sent the American a sample of her work that featured surreal vegetables and exploding seed pods, along with a letter asking for advice on how to break into the New York art world. Surprised to hear from a woman in rural Japan, O’Keeffe replied that as she lived in New Mexico, she could not offer insight; the correspondence did, however, mark the beginning of a life-long friendship.

     While proper Japanese girls of the 1950s only left home for marriage, Yayoi determined to move to America although she knew no one there, did not speak English. In order to circumvent postwar currency controls, Yayoi sewed money into her kimono. In her Manhattan apartment, an old door served as a bed, fish heads from dumpsters simmered as a broth; a room without heat led to freezing winters.

    Kusama began producing her trademark “Infinity Net” huge canvasses-one was 33-feet high-covered with seemingly endless mesmerizing waves of small loops. She described them, “White nets enveloping the black dots of silent death against a pitch-dark background of nothingness.” In her autobiography, Infinity Net, she related the occasion where she carried a canvass, far taller than herself, forty blocks through the streets of Manhattan to submit it to the Whitney. After their rejection, on her trek home a strong wind made her feel as if the canvas would become airborne. The roadblock she faced was the novel nature of her work; in addition, the New York art world of the era was so male dominated that even female gallery owners did not want to exhibit paintings that bore a woman’s signature.

      In 1962, Kusama sold her first canvasses to artists Frank Stella and Donald Judd for $75.00. The following year, her avant-garde work and exotic persona of a kimono-clad Asian drew attention, and she held a solo show at the Gertrude Stein gallery where she displayed a rowboat and oars that she and Judd had covered with plaster phalluses. An art critic dubbed the exhibition, “Alice in Willyland.” She additionally wallpapered the room with innumerable photocopies of the boat. Later, the diminutive powerhouse accused Andy Warhol, whom she had considered her friend, of stealing her idea by pasting endless pictures of a cow as wallpaper for his own show. Other objects adorned with a member of the male anatomy were chairs, ladders, mannequins, and baby carriages. Yayoi-who describes herself as asexual-claimed she made the phallic ornaments as a way of overcoming her fear of penises, a phobia that had its root of watching her father having sex with his geisha. Yayoi stated, “I am terrified of just the thought of something long and ugly like a phallus entering me, and that is why I make so many of them.”

       The only romance of Yayoi’s life was with the sculptor Joseph Cornell who, obsessed with Kusama, sent her a dozen poems a day. She told an interviewer of her decade-long relationship, “I disliked sex and he was impotent, so we suited each other well.” Nonetheless, the couple drew each other in the nude; she described his penis as “a big, desiccated calzone.”  One afternoon, she was sitting on his lawn when his mother dumped a large bucket of water over their heads. In a nod to Norman Bates, Joseph clung to his mother’s skirt and pleaded with her to forgive him. The incident cooled off Yayoi’s ardor though not her love.

     As the hippie movement gained momentum, Kusama came into her own, and she staged “happenings” in which she enticed onlookers to strip naked in Central Park, the Statue of Liberty, and the Brooklyn Bridge, then painted their nude bodies with polka dots as they cavorted to the beat of bongo drums. Decades before Occupy Wall Street, Kusama organized an event in Manhattan’s financial district, declaring that she wanted to, “Obliterate Wall Street men with polka dots.”

   Yayoi became increasingly known for her outlandish behavior; she offered to sleep with President Richard M. Nixon if he stopped the war in Vietnam. She wrote him, “Let’s paint each other with polka dots.” The Quaker President declined. During the 1968 summer of love, she staged-half a century ahead of its time-New York’s first homosexual wedding. Moving into fashion, she sold polka dot designs with holes to reveal breasts and buttocks. Kusama understood that to be a successful, she had to be a media presence because “the garret life of Van Gogh and Modigliani is not where it’s at.” Her publicity ploys worked, and she proudly declared she made the news as much as Andy Warhol, Jackie O., and President Nixon. Her notoriety made it back to Japan and her mother said she wished her daughter had died during a childhood illness.

    After Nixon’s re-election in 1972, the pendulum swung to conservatism, and the art world turned its back on the boundary breakers. Out of vogue, coupled with the deaths of Joseph and her father, in homing bird fashion, Yasoi returned home despite her label, the “shame of Matsumoto City.” There was no warm welcome for the return of the Prodigal Daughter; her high school had erased her name from its alumni list. She rented an apartment on the tenth floor of a tower block in Shinjuku, Tokyo, overlooking a cemetery; she worked on surreal collages, her elegy to Joseph. She also wrote a novel, The Hustler’s Grotto of Christopher Street, in which she compared the world of art to the world of pimping. The hallucinations and panic attacks of her youth returned in full force, and she again sought relief in suicide. However, her desire to paint superseded her desire to die, and she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital. For more than twenty years, she remained a forgotten footnote.

    A change in fortune occurred in 1989 when the Center for International Contemporary Arts in Manhattan put on a display of Kusama’s works that ushered in her revival. When the city held an exhibit at the David Zwirner Galley, people waited in line for forty-five seconds of viewing time. For the exhibition at the Venice Biennale, she filled a mirrored room with pumpkins. Several years later, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a venue where she had once held a “happening,” arranged a retrospective.

      Currently, the ninety-one-year-old Yayoi is a global phenomenon; more than five million visitors have lined up for viewings of her solo shows in Rio de Janeiro, Seoul, Taiwan while travelling exhibits made their way to the United States and Europe. Kusama’s signature polka dots-her clothes mimic her themes of her canvasses such as one outfit covered with yellow tentacles-are recognizable in the highest echelons of the art world. In 2017, the artist opened her own five-story gallery in Tokyo; in a nod to irony, Japan also has the Yayoi Kusama Museum. The Broad Museum in Los Angeles sold 90,000 $25.00 tickets in one afternoon to her exhibit which led The Los Angeles Times to ask if the artist was now, “Hotter than Hamilton?” Kusama had her own balloon in a Macy’s Day Parade alongside Pikachu, Sponge Bob, and the Elf on the Shelf.

    The woman who had survived on fish head broth achieved not only fame, but also a wealth beyond the wildest dreams of a child who once saw hallucinations in a field of flowers. Her trademark polka dots cover everything from Louis Vuitton dresses to buses in her hometown. In 2014, a canvass sold for $7.1 million, a record for a female artist. Fans have hashtagged her more than 300,000 times, and Adele used one of her famous Infinity Mirrored Rooms as a setting for her 2016 performance. The backdrop displayed mirrored walls adorned with paper lanterns that rotated and vibrated with splashes of color.

    After forty years, Yayoi remains a volunteer resident at the psychiatric hospital that lies in proximity to her three-story studio. Her official hours are from nine to six, but she often arrives at 3:00 in the morning in the desperate attempt to silence the voices in her head. Despite the ninety-one-year-old’s reliance on her blue polka dotted wheelchair, she is able to stand for periods of time in front of her easel. Although Yayoi has an international reputation and is in possession of a many-splendored bank account, she still seeks validation, an echo of the girl who lurks in a septuagenarian body.

        Any interviewer who asks the Grande Dame of pop art what she feels has been the highlight of her career is likely to receive a glaring expression under eyes framed by red anime bangs of a color not found in nature. Yayoi feels her greatest work lies in the realm of tomorrow. However, given her age and her brushes with the Grim Reaper, Kusama is thinking about her final resting place in Matsumoto-though not in the family plot. Her final thoughts on her morality shines a light on her indomitable spirit, “But I’m not dying yet. I think I can live another twenty years.” The polka dot princess’ life proves that sometimes a pumpkin can prove more magical than a carriage.