Yayoi Kusama Was the Avant-Garde Radical Who Became a Pop Icon
New York Times · LC · trust 40/100
In her mass-produced ubiquity, Kusama became one of her own dots, spreading her image into every corner of our culture.
Listen · 8:53 min Share full article A video projection of “Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict,” by Yayoi Kusama, in 2024. In her later years, Kusama was one of the most popular living artists in the world. Credit... Philip Fong/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images By Blake Gopnik
They were cloth penises, in fact, unmentionable in the era’s press, and they worked as one of the first of the great 1960s provocations of Yayoi Kusama, whose death at the age of 97 was announced on Thursday.
In her long life, she achieved something I’m not sure I’ve come across elsewhere: two very different moments of stardom, almost as though she’d been two different artists.
Back in 1962, the Times review didn’t even mention Warhol and Morris because Kusama, still in her first artistic incarnation, was so obviously more worthy of note.
Born in Japan in 1929 — into wealth but also into profound familial dysfunction — Kusama had moved to the United States by 1957. Within barely 18 months, vast canvases covered edge to edge in lines and dots had won her a place on New York’s cutting edge. Those “Infinity Nets,” a precursor to her late-career “Infinity Rooms,” counted as early steps in American art’s move beyond Abstract Expressionism. (They might have encouraged the allover patterns of Warhol’s early silk-screens, and possibly Agnes Martin’s first grids.)
A few years later, when Kusama came up with her phallic “Accumulations” — her “frankfurters” came to cover a rowboat, an ironing board, shoes — those counted as some of the earliest feminist art, depicting a world infected by maleness.
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