Yayoi Kusama died on August 14 in a Tokyo hospital of multiple organ failure. She was ninety-seven. Her studio announced the death on August 27, confirmed by David Zwirner Gallery, her longtime dealer, as Artforum first reported.
By the end, she was the world's top-selling female artist, a title that would have seemed unthinkable to the young woman who arrived in New York in 1957 with almost nothing. What she carried instead was a compulsion. As a child in Matsumoto, Kusama had hallucinated fields of dots and nets spreading over everything she saw, terrifying enough that she began drawing them obsessively just to survive them. "By continually reproducing the forms of things that terrify me," she wrote, "I am able to suppress the fear." That sentence is the key to everything she made for the next seven decades.
The dots became "Infinity Nets", monumental canvases she called her epic, "summing up all I was". They became stuffed phallic sculptures piled onto furniture, a coping mechanism for her fraught relationship with sex that Claes Oldenburg's wife later admitted her husband had borrowed without credit. Eventually they became the mirrored "Infinity Rooms", chambers where visitors watched themselves multiply into the void, which Kusama insisted were about self-obliteration: becoming "one of the dots among the millions of dots in the universe".
Fear, translated into spectacle, made her one of the most photographed artists on Earth. The rooms arrived just before the iPhone did, and museums learned they could reliably sell out a building on the promise of ninety seconds alone with her mirrors. In 2014, one of her early "Infinity Nets" sold for 7.1 million dollars at Christie's, a record for a living woman artist. She broke her own record five years later at 8.1 million dollars.
She lived, by choice, in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital from 1977 onward, painting daily in a nearby studio she built for that purpose. The hallucinations never left. Neither did the discipline of turning them into something millions of strangers would queue for.
