catalogue 17/01/09 16:19 Page 53

Yayoi Kusama Mirrored Years

catalogue 17/01/09 16:19 Page 54

The exhibition Yayoi Kusama Mirrored Years,

has been produced by Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen,
Rotterdam (the Netherlands)
and has been curated by Franck Gautherot (Le Consortium,
Dijon), Jaap Guldemond (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen,
Rotterdam), Seungduk Kim (Le Consortium, Dijon)
along with the Studio Kusama, Tokyo

M u s e u m B o i j m a n s Va n B e u n i n g e n , R o t t e rd a m
( T h e N e t h e r l a n d s ):
23 August – 19 October 2008
M u s e u m o f C o n t e m p o ra r y A r t , S y d n e y ( A u s t ra l i a ):
25 February – 8 June 2009
C i t y G a l l e r y, We l l i n g t o n ( N e w Z e a l a n d ):
4 September – 29 November 2009

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catalogue 17/01/09 16:19 Page 57

Table of content

2 The Exhibition: Yayoi Kusama, Mirrored Years

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

55 Foreword
Sjarel Ex, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, Paula Savage

59 Introduction
Jaap Guldemond, Franck Gautherot, Seungduk Kim

66 Re-Viewing Kusama, 1950-1975: Biography of Things

Midori Yamamura

114 Obsession as Revolution: Yayoi Kusama Follows

a Hallucination with the Social Reality
Diedrich Diedrichsen

126 A Picture Biography: 1959-2008

251 The ‘00s Years:

A Ten Years Journey through Kusama’s world
Franck Gautherot & Seungduk Kim

300 Some Questions to Lily van der Stokker

Franck Gautherot
301 My Answers to your Questions
Lily van der Stokker

305 Selected Biography and Exhibition History

315 Colophon

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catalogue 17/01/09 16:20 Page 66

Fig. 1 : Flower Spirit as it appears

in a slide taken in 1956
Fig. 2 : The slide mount of Flower Spirit
from 1956
Fig. 3 : Flower Spirit, ca. 1955, 1973-75

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catalogue 17/01/09 16:20 Page 67
Midori Yamamura
1. Kusama, letter to Neil Meitzler,
May 31 and September 7, 1956 (Neil
Meitzler papers, accession no. 2761,
Special Collection Division,
University of Washington Library,
Seattle).
2. For the relationship between
Kusama and Callahan, see Midori
Yamamura, “Kusama Yayoi’s Early
Years in New York: A Critical
Biography,” ed. Eric C. Shiner and
Reiko Tomii, Making A Home, exh. cat.
(New York: Japan Society; New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2007), 55.
3. See, for example, Leslie Camhi,
“Yayoi Kusama Returns Right on
Time,” in The Village Voice (July 14,
1998); Kim Levin, “Odd Woman
Out,” in The Village Voice (October
31, 1989); Roberta Smith, “Intense
Personal Visions of a Fragile
Japanese Artist,” in The New York
Times (October 20, 1989); clippings
in artist file, “Yayoi Kusama,” The
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),
New York, Library.
Re-Viewing Kusama, 1950-1975: Biography of Things
In July of 1956, an art student from Seattle by the name of
Robert Christiansen visited Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), then an
aspiring young artist, at her family home in Matsumoto City in
central Japan.1 He had been introduced via mail by a mutual
acquaintance, Neil Meitzler, who was a student of Kenneth
Callahan, with whom Kusama had been corresponding since
December 1955.2 As Christiansen happened to have a roll of
color positive film in his camera, he photographed Kusama’s
latest paintings. Several of these color slides have recently
been uncovered in her Tokyo archives. One of them, a “1955
oil painting by Yayoi Kusama, Yayoi Kusama’s family house,
photograph by the Seattleite Christiansen,” as noted in her
unmistakable Japanese handwriting on its mount (figs. 1-2) is
of Flower Spirit, before it was signed and dated.
Today this work (fig. 3) bears Kusama’s signature, the date
of 1948 (seven years earlier than the date that appears on the
mount), and significantly, is the earliest painting that reveals
“nets,” or what is believed to be the visual equivalent of her
“psychotic symptom.” But none of these details are present in
the painting captured in the slide. Furthermore, a careful
examination of Flower Spirit confirms that every detail legible
in the slide is still visible beneath the nets. This suggests that
Kusama reworked the canvas at some later date, which
complicates the conventional narrative of her biography.
The essentials of Kusama’s biography are by now well
known. She was born and raised in mountainous Matsumoto
City in Nagano Prefecture, arrived in New York in 1958, and
became active among Pop and Minimalist artists during their
formative years. Some critics assumed that she might have
influenced such canonical male artists as Claes Oldenburg and
Andy Warhol, among others.3 However, she was largely
forgotten in the United States after her permanent return to
Japan in 1973. Her art-historical reassessment began
retroactively, when canonical art history was already
established, leaving little room for her. In her major
retrospectives in 1989 and 1998, held in the United States, her
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4. See Alexandra Munroe, Yayoi
Kusama: A Retrospective “Obsession,
Fantasy and Outrage: The Art of Yayoi
Kusama,” exh. cat. (New York: Center
for International Contemporary Art,
1989), 20, 24; Lynn Zelevansky,
“Driving Image: Yayoi Kusama in New
York,” Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama,
1958-1968, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los
Angeles County Museum of Art,
1998), 14-15, 31.
5. Kusama said that while growing
up “I got anxiety neurosis” because
“I was [left] with [a] nurse” for a
long time and “my mother did not
take care of me.” Kusama, interview
by Bhupendra Karia and Alexandra
Munroe, December 17, 1989
(CICA/ATT/001.06).
6. Kusama, interview by Alexandra
Munroe, December 14, 1988
(CICA/ATT/001.01).
7. Kusama, “Miss Yayoi Kusama:
Interview Prepared for WABC Radio
by Gordon Brown, Executive Editor
of Art Voice,” De nieuwe stijl/The
New Style 2 (interview, 1963;
printed, 1965), 163.
8. Judging from the contents, the
statement was prepared in three
stages in late 1966. Kusama wrote a
first draft in Japanese and translated
it herself, then Jay Jacobs improved
it most likely in consultation with
Kusama. They then prepared a clean
copy and finally, Gordon Brown
copyedited and gave a new title to
the statement. Kusama, untitled
Japanese statement, 1966; Kusama
with Jay Jacobs, untitled draft
statement in English, 1966; Kusama,
“Statement by Yayoi Kusama,”
typescript, 1966; Kusama with
Gordon Brown, “Kusama, Kusama,
Kusama (World’s First Obsessional
Artist),” typescript, 1966, all
documents are in Kusama Archives.
9. Kusama, “Statement by Yayoi
Kusama.”
influence was not only dismissed,4 but also an opportunity for
subtle historical investigation slipped away, because of her
self-proclaimed mental illness: she has said that she suffers
from hallucinatory visions where she sees “nets” and “dots”
that profoundly affect her artistic development and manifest
themselves in her visual vocabulary.
Admittedly, from time to time, Kusama does suffer from
anxiety neurosis,5 which is a mild deviation of the mind
accompanied by unpleasant, distressing emotions. It is a
normal response to stressful situations. In interviews, Kusama
often mentions suffering from heart palpitations.6 This is
caused by too much anxiety, resulting in the body releasing
adrenaline and cortisone into the bloodstream, thus
quickening the heart rate. But heart palpitation is no proof of
hallucination. Moreover, her earliest account of hallucinations
appears in her 1963 interview with Gordon Brown.7 Prior to
1963, we find no reference to hallucinatory experiences in her
writings and interviews. Furthermore, the commonly accepted
version of her biography features the statement that Kusama
carefully prepared with the assistance of two art critics, Jay
Jacobs and Gordon Brown, in 1966:8
One day I experienced a great shock. I decided I
would look out of the window. But what did I see?
Nothing but my own net paintings spread out over the
entire windowpane. Looking about the room I found
that my nets covered the walls, ceilings, furniture, and
floor. This hallucination gave me an idea which I
developed in many of my later works.9
This episode was subsequently included in her
autobiographical text written in Japanese in 1975 and
eventually and unquestioningly incorporated into third-person
accounts of her life and art.
Kusama’s autobiographical narrative has long been a
double-edged sword. On one hand, her narrative of mental
illness led people to believe that her art developed separately
from any other existing tendencies or movements. On the
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10. Yamamura, 52-64.
11. For Kusama’s Nihonga study, see
Ibid., 53.
12. Kusama, letter to author, March
1, 2007.
13. Immediately after the new
constitution took effect in Japan in
Shiritsu Bijutsu Sen’mon Gakkō
1947, Kusama applied to the Kyoto
(Kyoto City University of Arts), but
failed the entrance exam and as a
result, entered its affiliated
Kōgei Gakkō (Kyoto Municipal
preparatory school, Kyoto Bijutsu
Hiyoshigaoka Upper Secondary
School) for one year. “Taidan, Miura
Kiyohiro/Kusama Yayoi” [A dialogue
between Kiyohiro Miura and Yayoi
Kusama], In Full Bloom: Yayoi
Kusama, Years in Japan, exh. cat.
(Tokyo: The Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1999), 24.
other hand, as in the case of Flower Spirit, her fascinating
biography has kept us from actual engagement with her work.
A close scrutiny of her art reveals that her work was also a
product of her time. In New York, being a Japanese woman in
an art world that privileged Anglo-American male artists,
however, Kusama formulated her work differently from that of
her male peers.
Extending my reexamination of Kusama,10 this essay
deploys feminist social-historical methods and centers on the
investigation of “things” that conceivably carry social, cultural,
and historical vestiges. They include artworks as well as
photographic records. These things are “read” against their
socio-historical milieu as reconstituted from her letters,
statements, notebooks, and calendar-diaries. By doing so, this
essay aspires to historically contextualize her art, clarify the
nature of her illness, and explain how she herself came to
promote it. My discussion begins with a detailed analysis of
Kusama’s early works that preceded Flower Spirit, followed by
a reexamination of her years in New York between 1959 and
1966, and concludes after her return to Japan in 1973, which
led to the crucial additions to Flower Spirit.
E a r l y O i l P a i n t i n g s : A D i f f i c u l t Tr a n s i t i o n
Like any other artist, Kusama struggled to master her craft
and develop her style. One has to understand that she made a
difficult transition from Nihonga (modern Japanese-style
painting; water soluble mineral pigment bound by deer-glue)
to oil painting. Kusama began receiving formal training in
Nihonga in 1942. Nihonga is a painterly practice frequently
associated with Japan’s national art from the late 1880s
through 1945, and it was the only art available to her, who
had aspired to become an artist since grade school, when
fanatic nationalism permeated during the war.11 Encountering
her parents’ fierce opposition to her becoming an artist,
between 1945 and 1947 she had to prove her artistic potential
to them by submitting her Nihonga every year to competitive
juried salon exhibitions and getting accepted.12 Finally in 1948,
the parents allowed her to apply to art school in Kyoto.13 Being
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14. Kusama’s participation in Sōzō
Bijutsu exhibition was previously
dated 1951. However, the actual
date is 1949, as documented in the
association’s 1949 catalogue. I thank
Reiko Tomii for pointing out the
possible misdating and confirming it
with Azusa Kaburagi, librarian at the
For more on Sōzō Bijutsu, see, for
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.
example, Chōken Ueshima,
“Bijutsukai kotoshi no momegoto”
Bijutsu techō [Art notebook], no. 12
[Art world’s scandals this year],
15. Kusama, interview by Yōko
(December, 1948), 41.
Kawasaki based on author’s
questions, March 20, 2007.
exposed to metropolitan art circles, however, she soon became
disgusted by the rampant conservatism in the Nihonga world.
of Sōzō Bijutsu (Creative Art), a prominent yet short-lived
In 1949, she rebelled by participating in the second exhibition
Nihonga collective established in 1948 in opposition to the
semi-governmental annual salon exhibition.14 Her defiance was
followed by a daring decision to quit Nihonga completely. She
thus took on oil painting around 1950, and began organizing
her solo exhibitions as an independent artist. To date, however,
little is known about Kusama’s early oil paintings.
“When and how did you learn to paint in oil?” Kusama’s
ready response to this question I recently posed is: she recalls
receiving her first oil painting set around 1942 from the
grandmother of a childhood friend as a souvenir from Tokyo.15
In light of this “non-answer,” the examination of her early oil
painting becomes imperative, not an easy task. As understood
from extant exhibition photographs and catalogs, before her
departure for Seattle in 1957, Kusama showed oil only once, in
her first solo exhibition held at the Matsumoto City Civic Hall
announces the presentation of about 200 drawings, kōsai
on March 18th and 19th, 1952. The show’s invitation card
(“animal-glue painting”), works in oil, and watercolors. Its
brochure serves as a checklist of 146 works. Most of her early
paintings were later re-titled, so no titles listed in the brochure
match existing works. No sizes listed in the brochure also
dimensions using the gō system. Usually, each standard gō
match existing works. This is because she gave all the
dimension can be converted into the metric system, but since
Kusama painted on handmade panels, fabricated by a family-
employed carpenter, the dimensions given are at best
approximations.
Five photographs survive from the first solo exhibition,
documenting altogether fifty-two works displayed on the wall.
Only one is signed and dated on the front: “1952 Y. Kusama”
(fig.4). This signature differs from most of her signatures found
on the front side of the extant early oil paintings today, signed
with her full name: “Yayoi Kusama.” This means most of her
early works were signed and dated at some later date, as is
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Fig. 4 : Exh. View: Kusama’s first solo exhibition in March 1952

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catalogue 17/01/09 16:20 Page 72
16. Yayoi Kusama, Mugen no ami:
Kusama Yayoi jiden [Infinity nets:
Yayoi Kusama autobiography],
(Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2002), 76.
17. Yayoi Kusama, Tokuji Fujimoto,
kakonde ‘Geijutsukendan (Jō)” [With
Masataka Ibe, “Kusama joshi wo
discussion], Shinano ōrai [Coming
Miss Kusama, a prefectural art
and Going to Nagano](October,
1978), 18.
demonstrated in the case of Flower Spirit. Only two extant
early oil paintings can be identified in photographs. They are
today known as Accumulation of the Plants (1950) and Bud
(1951). Less than ten works from this exhibition are known to
still exist.
This remarkably low survival rate of her early oil paintings
is due to her destruction of premature works. After January
1956, when she agreed to have her first United States
exhibition at Zoe Dusanne Gallery in Seattle and most likely
before July of the same year, Kusama burned most of her early
works, especially her Nihonga, on the banks of the Susuki
River behind her family house. Kusama’s own explanation
appears in her recent autobiography, Infinity Net (Mugen no
ami): she burnt them in order to prevent her mother from
giving them away.16 However, she did save some of her
Nihonga, oils, and abstract watercolors. This destruction
embodies not so much an attempt at erasure but of editing—
lest her premature works should surface later in her career. In
other words, it was a matter of her “professionalism.” By no
means, however, was Kusama an exception. Many other
modern artists also destroyed their premature works, including
two New York artists of a previous generation, Barnett
Newman and Morris Louis.
can best be understood in her unique invention of kōsai, listed
Kusama’s difficult transition from Nihonga to oil painting
kō means nikawa in Japanese, which is the animal glue used
in the invitation card of this exhibition. The Chinese character
“sand” and most likely called this technique kōsai, or literally
as a Nihonga binder. She employed animal glue to bind
“animal-glue painting.” According to her, she could not afford
to purchase expensive oil paints early in her career, so she
gathered sand from the riverbank behind her home; although
nikawa was the least expensive Nihonga material, “even
nikawa was expensive for me at the time. I bought inexpensive
house paints, mixed them with the sand. I did not have
enough money to buy canvas either. So I painted on a plywood
characterized as “mixed media,” her kōsai was a rather
panel, left over from the family house construction.”17 Best
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catalogue 17/01/09 16:20 Page 73
18. Kusama Yayoi/Yayoi Kusama,
exh. cat. (Tokyo: The National
Museum of Modern Art; Hiroshima:
Hiroshima City Museum of
Contemporary Art; Kumamoto:
Contemporary Art Museum; Nagano:
Matsumoto City Museum of Art,
2004), 266. Cat. no. 7.
Fig. 5 : On the Table, 1950
peculiar yet inventive way of painting in oil under the
circumstances—namely, the lack of funds and expertise.
seems to be executed in kōsai. Although it is today catalogued
Within her early œuvre, On the Table (fig.5) from 1950
as “oil and others on canvas,”18 a careful examination reveals
that it is a kind of “mock” oil painting. To begin with, it was
executed not on canvas but on a seed sack stretched over a
panel painted with white house paint, with the panel’s right
and left edges uncovered. This suggests both her inability to
purchase canvas and effort to simulate it. Kusama also
mimicked matière—or machieru in Japanese, which generally
means “facture”—of oil paint by mixing sand and animal-
glue, skillfully building a surface with rough, convex, grey
achromatic impastos. She then applied white (most likely
house paint) and colors (most likely oils) over this heavily built
surface.
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19. Akira Shibutami, conversation
with author (video recording by
Takako Matsumoto), January 13,
2008.
20. I thank Reiko Tomii for this
insight.
Her lack of expertise in oil resulted from her parents’
termination of financial assistance during this period, for they
were deeply disappointed in seeing their daughter leaving
what they believed to be a promising Nihonga career. This
made it difficult for her to gain formal training in oil, despite
her interest. Her struggle caused by her lack of knowledge is
painfully obvious on the back of Bud, the work that she
executed solely in oil. The back of this painting shows massive
penetration of the expensive oil paints from the front side
through the untreated jute sack. In order to stop the
penetration, she used urauchi, or lining the seed sack with
thick durable paper in the same way as Nihonga painters did
to strengthen their work. As with Flower Spirit, a majority of
Kusama’s early oil paintings are still in their original frames. A
future inspection may well prove that her “oil on canvases”
from 1950-1952 are actually painted on jute, plywood, or
cardboard. Likewise, additional information, such as date and
title, might also be found on the backside of her early
paintings.19 At any rate, Kusama was clearly an entirely self-
taught oil painter.
Kusama learned oil painting in a roundabout way by first
experimenting with watercolor. Between October 31st and
November 2nd, 1952 (fig.6), she staged her second solo
exhibition, again at the Matsumoto City Civic Hall. Although
the exhibition brochure announces the inclusion of oils, five
photographic documentation recording 106 works show no
oils. The exhibition most likely consisted solely of watercolors
executed in the uniform size of approximately 27 by 19 cm,
which corresponds to half of the standard yatsugiri (“eighth”)
size. The oils mentioned in the brochure could have referred to
those by three senior artists Kusama invited to participate in
her exhibition: Nobuya Abe, Yutaka Matsuzawa, and Kieko
Yamazaki.20 It was not until her first solo exhibition in New
York in 1959 that Kusama started showing oil paintings again.
Her seven-year training in Nihonga, which is a water-based
practice, must have made her feel more comfortable with
other water-based media, such as gouache, ink, and
watercolor, than with oil. Moreover, unlike oil, which requires a

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Fig. 6 : Exh. View: Kusama’s second solo exhibition in Oct. 1952

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catalogue 17/01/09 16:20 Page 76

21. Sh zÿ Takiguchi, “Yÿsei yo eien
ni,” [Eternal fairy], Yohaku ni kaku
(2) [Writing on void, 2], 308.
22. Kusama, letter to Georgia
O’Keeffe, December 13, 1955, in
Kusama Archives.
23. Hitherto undocumented, this
exhibition is mentioned in Yamazaki
Kieko, untitled text, Dai-nikai
Kusama Yayoi shinsaku koten [The
second Yayoi Kusama solo
exhibition], exh. cat. (Matsumoto:
The Matsumoto City Civic Hall,
1952), in Kusama Archives.
24. A Surrealist decalcomania
technique was invented to achieve
the accidental image by placing a
blot of ink or a dab of paint onto a
piece of paper, which is pressed
against another sheet, creating two
contingent patterns.
25. Kusama, letter to Nobuya Abe,
correspondence-A, Takiguchi Shūzō
April 1954 (Takemiya Gallery related
Archives, Keiō University, Tokyo).
protracted period of time to dry and must be done in stages,
watercolor lends itself more readily to spontaneity. Watercolor
forces driven by her anxiety. As later observed by Shūzō
thus suited Kusama’s expressive need to manifest her inner
Takiguchi, the respected art critic, Kusama’s early watercolors
“rest on ceaseless urgency.”21
The other possible reason that pushed her to water-based
media during this time was her keen interest in avant-garde
discourse. Although by the mid 1950s, Kusama no longer
belonged to “any group or party,”22 while she experimented
with non-Nihonga media, she was not indifferent to other
artists. In 1952, before her second solo exhibition, she
exhibited in a group show, with eleven other local artists, held
at the Fuji Department Store in Matsumoto.23 Kusama would
have participated in the discussion that took place among
these local artists, engrossed with the latest critical issues. She
broadened her knowledge through such creative exchanges,
one of which could have resulted in her confident re-embrace
of water-based media. Critics like Takiguchi, who contributed a
foreword to the catalogue of her second exhibition, believed
that oil painting was not the sole internationally competitive
medium; in fact, he was instrumental in introducing Surrealist
decalcomania technique using watercolor in Japan, as early as
1937.24
Takiguchi was one of two Tokyo-based critics, the other
being Takachiyo Uemura, with whom Kusama purposely forged
ties in the early 1950s, as indicated in her recently uncovered
letter to a vanguard artist and critic Nobuya Abe, which also
demonstrates her effort to expand her network.25 Both
Takiguchi and Uemura were founding members of the Avant-
Garde Artists Club (Aban Gyarudo Bijutsuka Kurabu),
established in 1947, which promoted abstraction as a new
international language. Kusama might have seen Alfred H.
Barr, Jr.’s famous diagram, “From Impressionism to Modern
contemporary art magazine Bijutsu techō (Art notebook). It
Art,” reproduced in the October 1948 issue of the
accompanied the article on abstraction by Uemura, who
touted abstraction as the “twentieth-century sensibility of
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catalogue 17/01/09 16:20 Page 77
26. Takachiyo Uemura, “Gendai
kaiga no keifu I” [Genealogy of
techō [Art notebook], (October,
contemporary painting (1)], Bijutsu
1948), 17.
27. Nobuya Abe, “Atarashii kaiga no
rikai” [Understanding new painting],
in The Second Yayoi Kusama Solo
Exhibition.
28. Kusama, letter to Abe.
29. Takiguchi,305.
30. According to Kusama’s earliest
bibliography, the second exhibition
was featured in more than ten
regional and national newspapers
and in one of Japan’s major art
magazines Atorie [Atelier], in
Kusama Archives. For her parents’
financial assistance, see Kusama,
letter to Abe.
31. One hitherto uncatalogued
decalcomania dated 1953 exists in
the collection of the artist.
32. I thank the curator Hideki Sugino
of Toyama Modern Art Museum for
sharing his insights on this work and
making the work accessible for my
research.
internationalism,” echoing the opinion of Barr, who was an
official of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.26 Her
informed embrace of new art is evident in the catalogue from
her second exhibition. Abe was another Club member, whom
she invited to contribute a lengthy essay. In his text, Abe
explained the scientific significance of abstraction by noting
the conceptual similarity between abstract art and nuclear
physics, an idea which he borrowed from György Kepes’s 1944
book, The Language of Visions.27 He further discussed the
social commitment of postwar artists to unifying art and
technology in emulation of the works by de Stijl and Bauhaus
artists.
Kusama possibly came in contact with Abe through the
Nagano-based conceptual artist Yutaka Matsuzawa. (Both Abe
and Matsuzawa contributed works to her second solo
exhibition.) Abe, in turn, introduced her works to Takiguchi.28
Takiguchi himself later remembered that he had initially
become acquainted with her “drawing series in sumi ink”
through an agent.29 In early 1953, when her parents’ financial
assistance resumed following the success of her second solo
exhibition, Kusama immediately went to Tokyo and finally met
Takiguchi in person.30 The meeting apparently propelled her to
experiment with decalcomania, with her earliest work using
this technique dating from 1953.31 She became more adept
with it, after moving to Tokyo in 1954. For example, her
Tempted Sun (fig.7) from 1954 reveals mimicry of the
decalcomania effect through the use of the Nihonga technique
of tarashikomi, an invention of Rinpa School that used a
chance effect of paint spreading on a wet surface.32 In
contrast, her 1955 work, Gill, (fig.8) shows a fine, deftly
executed decalcomania, akin to Takiguchi’s own microcosmic
watercolors (fig.9). A fruitful exchange between them can be
imagined from the fact that Kusama gave Takiguchi both
Tempted Sun and Gill.
While developing her watercolor technique, Kusama also
broadened her knowledge of oil painting through exchanges
with other vanguard artists. In 1954, she reported to Abe: “I
am now reading Matière of Oil Painting written by
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Fig. 7 : Tempted Sun, 1955

Fig. 9 : Shuzo Takiguchi, Fantom of

Matthias Grunewald, 1955

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catalogue 17/01/09 16:20 Page 79

Fig. 8 : Gill, 1956

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33. Kusama, letter to Abe.
Gyoshū no geijutsu” [Gyosh
34. Michiaki Kawakita, “Hayami
 students. Indeed, the earlier version of Flower Spirit, as
Hayami’s art], Hayami Gyosh 
(Tokyo: Yamatane Museum, 1977),
18. For Kusama’s interest in Hayami,
see Akira Tatehata, “Kusama as
Autonomous Surrealist,” trans. Bert
Winther-Tamaki, Love Forever, Yayoi
Kusama: 1958-1968 (Los Angeles:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
1998), 62. Another painter
mentioned as “Murayama” is a
mistranslation. The artist’s name is
“Kagaku Murakami,” in Tatehata’s
Japanese text.
35. Kusama, Infinity Net, 76.
36. Based on the recollection of
Mario Yrissary, Kusama’s neighbor in
1961 and 1962, whose wife Helen
occasionally assisted Kusama at her
studio, in interview by author, August
29, 2008.
37. In the spring of 1960, Kusama
began producing the colored Infinity
Nets series (red, yellow, green
paintings known to exist). This later
series is sometimes painted on a
white ground without any additional
layer of paint.
Shikanosuke Oka,”33 then a must-read textbook among art
recorded in the slide of 1956 (fig.1), shows many experiments
with matière, or facture. The organic red and black patterns
that occupied the center were executed in layers. Some parts
were intentionally scraped to show the whitish color beneath.
In order to achieve a textural complexity, Kusama further
added, probably in ink, patterns that look like leaf-veins in the
white areas. The painting’s borders, done in layers of slightly
projecting fine stripes, are today covered almost completely by
the nets, but the details are still visible underneath. In other
words, finally in 1955, Kusama was able to create matière.
We still have to consider one nagging question: When on
earth did Kusama repaint and date Flower Spirit? In order to
thoroughly answer this question, we need to first understand
her artistic and personal path in New York. On November 18th,
1957, Kusama departed for New York, with a prior six-month
stay in Seattle. Few months before the departure, she
Kusama much respected, Gyoshū Hayami once said: “The artist
destroyed most of early her works. A Nihonga painter whom
must have courage to go down the ladder that he or she has
climbed.”34 She, too, pledged to “create many more and better
works than those I destroyed.”35 It was this uncompromising
attitude that would lead to her early success in New York.
D r i v i n g I m a g e: A t a n I n t e rs e c t i o n o f N e w Yo r k A r t ,
1 962 -19 64
In June 1958, Kusama arrived in New York City. There, the
artist first developed a series of large canvases, known today
as Infinity Nets (fig.10). The earliest works in this series are
made up of large, usually horizontal oil paintings with
repeated small white arc that she called “net” or netto in
Japanese.36 They are superimposed on a black foundation
overlain with a wash of white.37 The painting had no center or
sense of composition. This series of paintings evolved from a
group of smaller watercolors, entitled Pacific Ocean, which first
came into being in late 1958. It was not until 1959, however,
that she began to use her signature net motif as the sole
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Fig. 10 : No AB, 1959

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38. Kusama showed Number III, B.P.
Red at the Whitney and a purple
painting, The West, at the Carnegie
International, both from 1960.
39. I thank Tom Doyle for informing
me about this influential exhibition.
40. Yamamura, 64.
41. Kusama, “Miss Yayoi Kusama:
Interview Prepared for WABC Radio
by Gordon Brown, Executive Editor
of Art Voice,” 162.
element of her painting. In October 1959, she showed five
large white Infinity Nets in a solo exhibition at the downtown
cooperative Brata, making a successful debut in her new
adopted home. The show’s favorable outcome led to a contract
with Stephen Radich, an uptown commercial gallery in
September 1960. In May 1961, she had a remarkably
successful second solo exhibition in New York. The show’s
triumph resulted in an exhausting exhibition schedule during
the fall-winter season of 1961: solo shows at both the Chicago
and Washington, D.C. branches of Gres Gallery, while one each
of her red monochromatic paintings was on view at the
Whitney Annual and the Carnegie International—gateways for
successful young artists.38 Contrary to what we may expect,
after such a quick ascent in her career, she had no solo
exhibition for the next two-and-half years in New York.
Ironically, this hiatus might have been the result of her
receiving too much attention as an extremely innovative young
artist.
In June 1960, after seeing a much-talked about exhibition,
New Forms-New Media—a chronological survey that
demonstrated a historical link between Dada and Neo-
Dadaism—held at Martha Jackson Gallery,39 Kusama began
experimenting with mixed media, introducing commonplace
objects in her art. The first piece that she made was a wall
relief using an egg carton, sumi ink, and paper-clay in the fall
of 1960.40 In the following year, as she stated in 1963 WABC
interview with Gordon Brown, Kusama made “many collages
of postage stamps, airmail stickers, and paper dollars.”41 Her
repetitive use of commonplace objects and a similar strategy
employed by Andy Warhol has long been a topic of discussion.
The conventional consensus is that Warhol’s use of everyday
objects and his repetition of imagery are his major contribution
to U.S. Pop Art. However, Kusama preceded Warhol in both
respects, as indicated by a reconstituted chronology based on
meticulous records Kusama kept in her inventory notebook,
about the “ins” and “outs” of her works from her studio, as
well as on accounts gleaned from her correspondence and the
testimonies offered by others.
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42. George Frie and Neil Printz, ed.
The Andy Warhol Catalog Raisonné:
Paintings and Sculpture, 1961-1963
(New York: Andy Warhol Foundation
of the Visual Arts, Inc.; Zurich:
Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, 2002),
vol. 1., 64.
43. Kusama, interview by author, July
28, 2006.
44. All quotes and statements by
Judd in this section are taken from
Donald Judd interview by Alexandra
Munroe and Reiko Tomii
(CICA/ATT/001.36). From her
bankbook, Kusama moved from 53
East 19th Street to 211 Mott Street
around August 1964.
45. Kusama, letter to Beatrice Perry,
September 19, 1962, in Folder
“Beatrice Perry,” Kusama Archives.
46. Kusama, notebook (2).
47. This exhibition still also informs
when Warhol actually began using
silkscreen method.
48. Ibid.
The “Campbell’s Soup Can” series is the first commonplace
object that Warhol used in his work and it dates back to
December 1961.42 According to his 2002 catalog raisonné, he
began to use repetitive images of the soup cans around
January 1962. Kusama’s earliest collages were recorded in her
inventory in 1961, but today, she does not remember
exhibiting them.43 Fortunately, Donald Judd, her upstairs
neighbor between 1961 and 1964, remembered that one of
her collages was shown in a group show at Stephen Radich
Gallery.44 The exhibition in question is mentioned in Kusama’s
letter to her Washington, D.C., dealer Beatrice Perry, dated
September 19, 1961. She wrote that the group show was
going to “open on September 21st for three weeks” and she
was participating because “this will be my last chance
showing my work in New York this season.”45 Unfortunately,
she uncharacteristically failed to record the works she brought
to the Radich Gallery, but a slightly later record, logged on
January 15, 1962, indicates that one work she sent to the
Dutch artist Henk Peeters was a photo collage made in 1961.46
Despite her memory lapse, she was certainly promoting her
new body of work around this time. The end of the group
show at Radich was marked in Kusama’s calendar-diary as
October 14th, little over three weeks from its opening. Since
Kusama terminated her contract with Radich Gallery on
October 28th in order to enter an exclusive business
relationship with Beatrice Perry, who wanted to promote
Kusama’s work internationally, Judd could not have seen her
collage at Radich Gallery after this date. Most importantly,
Judd thought that Warhol could have seen Kusama’s collage at
the Radich Gallery exhibition in 1961.
In June 1962 (fig.11), Warhol premiered his silkscreen One-
Dollar Bills in a group show at Green Gallery, a prominent
vanguard venue in New York.47 Kusama also participated in the
same show and consigned two furniture sculptures and four
sticker collages.48 While her collages did not make it to the
main gallery, Warhol’s work did. Richard Hu Bellamy, the
Chinese-American director of Green Gallery, privileged
Warhol’s silkscreen over Kusama’s collages, only because he
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Fig. 11 : Exh. View at Green Gallery,

New York, June 1962,
with Kusama’s, Accumulation #2
and Warhol, 192 One-Dollar Bill

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49. This is Oldenburg’s account. He
said: “I don’t know any other sewn
sculptures at that time. She
[Kusama] was probably the only one
that I know of.” Claes Oldenburg,
interview by Alexandra Munroe and
Reiko Tomii. (CICA/ATT/001.47).
50. Tom Doyle, interview by author
(video recording by Takako
Matsumoto), October 10, 2006.
51. Thomas Kellein, Donald Judd,
exh. cat. (New York: DAP, Inc., 2002),
34.
52. See, for example, Donald Judd,
“Reviews and Previews: New Names
This Month—Yayoi Kusama,” Art
News (October 1959), 17; Donald
Judd, “Local History,” Arts Yearbook
7: New York—The New Art World
(1963), 22-35.
wanted to showcase her first soft sculptures, Accumulation No.
1 (armchair) and No. 2 (couch) in the main gallery. Her soft
sculptures were charmingly eccentric. They were anti-
monumental, yet no one ever attempted to sew sculpture on
this scale.49 Fraught with charged sexual symbolism, they
looked eerie yet intellectually intriguing. If anything, they were
too good to be premiered in a group exhibition at the season’s
end, which usually attracted very little attention, as opposed to
the season’s opening in September. Critical attention thus
eluded both Kusama’s soft sculptures and collages. In this
light, one of Judd’s comments on her repetitive imagery is
poignant: “I thought she should have gotten a credit for this.
She should in a way.”
Aside from Warhol, Kusama’s two artist-neighbors between
1961 and 1964 at 53 East 19th Street, Judd himself and Eva
Hesse, also took notice of her work. Judd lived upstairs from
Kusama, Hesse, in an adjoining building. Hesse’s former
husband Tom Doyle remembers visiting Kusama’s studio
“together with Eva,” most likely in the fall of 1962. He saw
Accumulation No. 2 and many airmail stickers on her desk. He
recalls: “That kind of compulsiveness about the work later
enabled Eva to do the very compulsive work that she did.”50
Doyle also remembers seeing Judd at her studio. During his
formative years, Judd spent considerable time assisting
Kusama. The curator Thomas Kellein observed that Judd’s
“crucial aesthetic changes” took place “in the fall of 1961.”51
Notably, Kusama moved downstairs from Judd on September
1, 1961. On one hand, having just completed the master’s
program in art history at Columbia University, Judd was still
mainly engaged in art criticism, through which he helped
Kusama significantly.52 On the other hand, Kusama seems to
have been an inspiration for his early development as an
artist. He later recalled learning “a lot” from Kusama, that
“she was kind of a model for me” and “I like a lot of her
work.” What became Judd’s trademark after 1964—seriality
and repetition—had been already prominent in Kusama’s
collages since 1961. Kusama thus occupied an interesting
intersection of Pop, Minimalist, and post-Minimalist art.
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catalogue 17/01/09 16:20
53. Yamamura, 61.
54. Kusama, letter to Richard Hu
Ballamy, January 29, 1963. Although
Perry never disclosed details of her
business venture, Gres Gallery in
Washington, D.C. closed in March
1962.
55. Ibid.
56. Richard Bellamy, postcard to
Kusama, August 18, 1960. I thank
Bellamy’s biographer Judith Stein for
sharing this information with me.
57. All quotes by Oldenburg in this
section are taken from
(CICA/ATT/001.47).
58. For example, Kusama referred to
Oldenburg’s Happening in her letter
to Perry, August 23, 1963, in Kusama
Archives. The curator Alice Denney
remembers taking a part in
Kusama’s Happening in her
“Aggregation: One Thousand Boat
Show” in December 1963. Alice
Denney, interview by author,
December 20, 2006.
59. The purchase of the glass panes
is noted on January 16, 1962 in her
calendar-diary.
Fig. 12 : Kusama in a glass enclosure,
ca. January 1962
Page 86
Judd also credits Kusama for introducing his work to her
dealer Bellamy during Bellamy’s visit to her studio, most likely
in May 1962.53 As he later recounted: “I was taken for the
gallery, but Yayoi wasn’t” and “Yayoi would like to have been
in Green Gallery.” In early 1962, Kusama desperately looked
for a powerful representative in New York, as her exclusive
dealer Beatrice Perry failed to secure gallery space in
Manhattan’s Upper East Side, due to the complex property
laws in New York City.54 Since Kusama considered the Green
Gallery to be “most active”55 in the vanguard scene, she
longed to join it. She had good prospects, because Bellamy,
who was known as an astute connoisseur of new art, had
expressed interest in her work even before opening his gallery
in 1960.56 He was also known to be open to Asian artists, with
his mother being a Chinese immigrant to the United States.
One of Kusama’s most original contributions to the New
York art world is her sewn soft sculpture, which Claes
Oldenburg labeled as her “psychotic art” with a “very
aesthetic direction.”57 In 1962, Kusama began developing her
Infinity Nets painting into environments, most likely inspired by
Happenings, which she witnessed performed by Oldenburg and
others.58 In one experiment of constructing an environment,
she purchased glass panes in early January 1962—as duly
noted in her calendar-diary—and created an enclosure for her
net paintings (fig.12).59 During this period, she also began
collecting objects. Her calendar-diary includes entries about
acquiring a piece of furniture (January 31, 1962) and a
rowboat (February 6, 1962). Judd remembered pushing the
rowboat on dollies through the streets with her. One thing that
Kusama most seriously searched for was an idea or a deeper
meaning to attach to her environments. Her December 1961
encounter with Yasuhiko Taketomo, a psychiatrist in New York,
was crucial. Although Kusama was already exposed to
psychiatrist Shihō Nishimaru, Japanese psychiatric practice in
psychiatry in Japan through her acquaintance with the
the 1950s differed significantly from Freudian and Jungian
psychotherapy practiced in the West. Nishimaru specialized in
dissecting actual brains to analyze the properties of genius
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catalogue 17/01/09 16:20
60. In one case, Nishimaru created a
Japanese novelist Sōseki Natsume by
pathography of the renowned
searching for a relationship between
tendency. Nishimaru Shihō, Hōkōki:
Natsume’s work and his bipolar
Kyōki o ninatte [Records of
(Tokyo: Hihyōsha, 1991), 65-69.
wandering: Taking on insanity]
61. Kusama, letter to Abe.
62. Yasuhiko Taketomo, handwritten
note, ca. 1962, in Kusama Archives.
63. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’”
in On Creativity and the Unconscious
(1919; reprint, New York: Harper,
1958), 122-61.
64. “Obsession” eventually became
a sales-point of her work. See, for
example, Kusama with Brown,
“Kusama, Kusama, Kusama.”
65. Yamamura, 59-60.
Fig. 13 : Kusama with an Egg Carton
Relief and Accumulation #1,
ca. October 1962
Fig. 14 : Exh. View at Green Gallery,
New York, June 1962,
with Kusama’s, Accumulation #1
and Oldenburg, Suit
Page 88
and in creating artists’ pathographies to study their works.60
While in Japan, Kusama attempted to secure scientific proof
from psychiatrists about her artistic talent so she could obtain
a government scholarship to study abroad.61
Taketomo offered Kusama something new: she seems to
have been truly intrigued by his scientific interpretation of her
work. In his opinion, her creativity was driven by her
obsessive-compulsive disorder, which was part of the anxiety
neurosis that she suffered from. Kusama kept a handwritten
note from Taketomo that explained in both English and
Japanese about her neurosis.62 According to Taketomo’s note,
the patient suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder
exhibits irrational thoughts (obsession) that would result in
repetitive behaviors (compulsion). Her new interests in
obsessive thoughts prompted her to probe deeply into her
Kusama herself described as kyōfu (literally “fear”). This
psyche for feelings that Freud labeled “uncanny”63 and which
resulted in formal representation in her art through the
phallus, which differed significantly from the abstract
representation of her Infinity Nets.64 In March 1962, Kusama
created Accumulation No. 1 (armchair) and an egg-carton
relief (fig.13). They were fraught with psychosexual
undertones,65 which intrigued the young Oldenburg, who
shared similar interests as apparent in his sexually charged
Happenings.
In June 1962, Oldenburg, who had not yet launched his
own soft sculpture series, also showed with Kusama and
Warhol at Green Gallery’s group show, in which Kusama
premiered her Accumulation No. 1 and No. 2 (fig.14). He
presented a suit with a shirt and tie, made of muslin “dipped
in plaster, placed on a wire, a chicken wire... [which] then...
gets hard (author’s emphasis).” He would later admit that he
was most interested in her sewn sculptures, going so far as to
say that he went to all of Kusama’s exhibitions through 1964.
In his exact words: “I remember Sofa (1962), I remember a
boat (1963-64), I remember ladder (1964).” He has also firmly
denied her influence: he explained that his soft sculpture
developed separately from hers, because his work already had
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66. Oldenburg used a sewn-prop a “very cloth-like look.”66 But the timing of his soft sculpture is
entitled “Upside-Down City” in his
Ray Gun Theater around May 1962.
too close to their June group show to accept his explanation at
Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology (New face value. After this show, Oldenburg “used [the space of]
York: Guggenheim Museum Green Gallery for making a lot of sculpture pieces.” This body
Publications, 1995), 142-143. However,
he never produced any sewn-piece as of work, known today as his first soft sculptures, was shown at
an independent artwork until after July Green Gallery in September 1962 and brought him
1962. A photograph of Oldenburg
making his first giant soft sculptures at
immediately to international attention. After this exhibition,
the closed Green Gallery during this Bellamy included Kusama only once in a group show, but no
summer is reproduced in Barbara longer considered representing her. This outcome was not
Rose, “Chronology,” Claes Oldenburg
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, surprising, as both Oldenburg—helped by his former wife and
1970), 201. some assistants—and Kusama made sewn sculptures with
67. Ed Clark, interview by author
(video recording by Takako
psychosexual implications.
Matsumoto), October 9, 2006.
68. Kusama’s translator in 1962, The Hallucinatory Experience
Kiyoharu Miura mentions “obsessive-
compulsive neurosis” in Kiyoharu Donald Judd remembered that Kusama “was irritated by
Miura/Yayoi Kusama, In Full Bloom: Warhol,” but her shock at seeing Oldenburg’s sewn sculptures
Yayoi Kusama, Years in Japan (Tokyo:
The Museum of Contemporary Art and
at Green Gallery was immeasurable, as he remembered that
Tankosha Publishing Co., Ltd., 1999), she became “very paranoid about the New York art situation.”
26. Judging from her calendar-diary, Another artist-neighbor from this period, Ed Clark, remembers
Miura received Kusama’s letter during
her hospitalization in November 1962 that she suddenly got obsessed with the thought that her
notifying him of her condition. ideas might be appropriated, which compelled her to close all
69. The date of the photograph can be
determined by Kusama’s hairstyle.
the curtains facing Park Avenue and 19th Street.67 Kusama’s
Kusama appears in a new, banged-hair translator from this period remembered also that in 1962 she
in Oldenburg’s Sports performance, suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, closed all her
photographed on October 5, 1962.
Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology (New windows, and became unable to walk out of her studio.68
York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995), Indeed, a photograph taken in the fall of 1962 shows huge
167. Figure 15 was most likely shot
sometime between September 18
canvases serving as screens, placed before the large windows
(Oldenburg’s show’s opening) and (fig.15).69
October 5, 1962, in order to promote This tension from rivalry and the stress caused by the urge
her version of soft sculptures.
70. Her first nervous breakdown in to complete a massive amount of sewn sculptures in a short
New York took place in July 1960. For period of time drove her to her second nervous breakdown in
the details, please see Yamamura: 59-
60. According Helen Yrissary—one of
New York (her first took place in July 1960).70 In her Japanese
Kusama’s friends who assisted her in draft for the 1966 statement, in which she frankly discussed
making soft sculptures—five people her mental condition, she recalled this 1962 event: “I was
from the neighborhood routinely
helped Kusama to complete a massive gravely afflicted by the feeling as if one minute were one hour
number of sculptures in a short period long.”71 On September 29, 1962, eleven days after Oldenburg’s
of time. Helen Yrissary, interviewed by
Heather Lenz, August 29, 2008.
opening, Kusama very likely suffered from anxiety neurosis and
71. Kusama, untitled Japanese took Doriden, a sedative to treat insomnia, as noted in her
statement, 1966.

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Fig. 15 : Kusama at her studio, ca. September, 1962

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72. In the recent Claes Oldenburg:
An Anthology, the date of
Oldenburg’s Green Gallery exhibition
is recorded as “September 24-
October 20.” In Rose’s 1970
“Chronology,” the date is registered
as “September 18-October 3.”
Kusama noted the opening of the
exhibition as September 18. I
followed Rose’s chronology. David
Platzker, “Selected Exhibition
History,” Oldenburg: An Anthology,
536; Rose, “Chronology,” 201;
Kusama, Calendar-diary, September,
1962.
73. In the untitled Japanese
statement of 1966, she wrote “I lost
my confidence and out of despair,
cut my wrist with a blade.” This
statement was transformed into “I
tried to take my own life” in her
statement with Brown, “Kusama,
Kusama, Kusama.”
74. The detailed description about
this hospitalization was written in
Kusama’s untitled Japanese
statement of 1966, which was
omitted in the statement she
prepared with Jay Jacobs,
“Statement by Yayoi Kusama.” The
incident was re-inserted in Kusama
with Brown, “Kusama, Kusama,
Kusama.”
75. A sheet that bears the instruction
for her medication and two
diagrams has been found inserted in
Kusama’s notebook (1). It is written
on the stationery of her doctor at St.
Luke’s Hospital, but she says she
does not remember the name of this
doctor.
76. Kusama, notebook (1). Kusama,
interview by Yÿko Kawasaki based
on author’s question; e-mail to
author, May 10, 2007.
77. Kusama, untitled Japanese
statement, 1966.
78. Kusama, Fujimoto, Ibe., 23.
79. Kusama, “Excerpts from ‘Postwar
Reflections’ by Yayoi Kusama” 1960,
in Kusama Archives.
80. Kusama, “Miss Yayoi Kusama,”
163.
calendar-diary.72 This is the first time Doriden is mentioned in
her calendar-diary between 1960 and 1963. Being mindful
about her health, she recorded the days she took this
medicine. Although an October page is missing from her
calendar-diary, the November page bears her notation of
taking Doriden for ten consecutive days, beginning on
November 9th. On November 24th, she most likely attempted
suicide,73 and was hospitalized at St. Luke’s Hospital—her first
stay in the psychiatric department.74
Doriden was a tranquilizer popular in the fifties and the
sixties. The medication likely brought about some sort of
hallucinatory experiences in Kusama’s case. After being
discharged from the hospital on December 1, 1962, Kusama
was instructed to take Miltown during the day and Doriden at
night by a doctor at St. Luke’s Hospital.75 An almost weekly
doctor’s appointment is noted in her calendar-diary, beginning
on November 29, 1962 through the end of 1963.76 After the
hospitalization, she only recorded four days in February for not
taking Doriden. Which is to say, for a considerable time in
1963, Kusama was sedated all day long, certainly unable to
concentrate on any intricate work. She later wrote, “After the
event [hospitalization], I was bedridden for one month,
suffered from nausea, hallucination, and above all lethargy
that made my heart palpitate.”77 Related to this experience,
Kusama also once recounted in a friendly interview with two
Matsumoto acquaintances that, “while [I was] sleeping, tulips
would multiply and cover the ceiling.”78
Kusama in 1963 began mentioning her hallucinatory
experiences clearly associated with her second nervous
breakdown. Although in 1960, she had described her Infinity
Net series simply as being “painted flat on undivided space,”79
she changed her tune in her 1963 WABC interview with
Gordon Brown: “My nets grew beyond myself and beyond the
canvases I was covering with them. They began to cover the
walls, the ceiling, and finally the whole universe.”80
Significantly, the first environment she created by covering the
whole room, including the ceiling, with her image was
“Aggregation: One Thousand Boat Show” (fig.16), which
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opened in December 1963 at the Gertrude Stein Gallery. In this

exhibition, the single Row Boat, placed in the center of the
room, was repeated 999 times in the form of the poster that
reproduced its image.
Kusama’s work projecting her psychiatric disorder and
stark loneliness embodied the competitive and stress-filled
atmosphere of 1960s New York. An idea comparable to her
“Boat Show” later emerged in Warhol’s Cow Wallpaper that
he showed at Castelli Gallery in 1966. Kusama herself
expanded on the idea: her subsequent “Driving Image Show”
of 1964 was about a woman’s anxiety manifested in a room
filled with food and sex symbolism. She spread shaped-
macaroni on the floor and called it “macaroni carpet”; she

previous page:
Fig. 16 : Kusama standing inside of her
Aggregation: One Thousand Boat Show,
1964
Fig. 17 : Kusama, Driving Image Show
(detail), at Castellane Gallery, New York,
1964

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81. Louise Bourgeois “Sixty-one
Questions,” Destruction of the Father
Reconstruction of the Father:
Writings and Interviews 1923-1997
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
1998), 94.
82. Kusama, unpublished text, 1967,
in Kusama Archives.
83. Kusama, untitled Japanese
statement, 1966.
84. This is the subtitle of the 1966
statement, “Kusama, Kusama,
Kusama,” which Kusama finalized
with Gordon.
85. Kusama, notebook (2). Another
work dated by Kusama to 1963, but
not in the inventory, is Arm Chair, in
the collection of Akron Art Museum
(acquisition #1970.54).
also covered household objects with phallic protuberances and
attached flower and leaf decals to these objects (fig.17). The
show took place at Castellene Gallery between April 20th and
May 9th. A mere four months later, a similar strategy emerged
in the young Lucas Samaras’s “ready-made” of his own room,
which was presented at Green Gallery between September 16th
and October 10th. But the sixties art world seemed exclusively
homophilic. It was “a world where both men and women are
trying to please men in power,” recalled Louise Bourgeois.81
And the best seasonal slots in first-rate galleries were usually
reserved for seductive young male artists for male critics. For
being a Japanese woman, Kusama’s art was destined to be
marginalized. At the same time, for their successes at a
remarkably young age, “the artists in New York,” Kusama
observed, “lost the opportunity to develop themselves and
they wasted their energy in a swirl of vanity.”82 For her part,
she became more and more interested in her own “uncharted
problems related to death and illness.”83
Despite her self-proclamation as the “World’s First
Obsessional Artist,”84 after the fall of 1962, she did not
produce compulsively. The photograph of her studio taken
around that time includes many soft sculptures she had
created by then: an armchair, a couch, a dining table and
chairs, a rowboat, shoes, a floor mat, among others. Her major
installation, “One Thousand Boat Show” of 1963 featured a
one-year-old boat, documented in the 1962 photograph. The
only additional work Kusama did was the design and
production of the poster. In another massive undertaking,
“Driving Image Show” of 1964, all its large-scale works—Ten-
Guest Table (fig.18), Accumulation No.1 and No.2, and Row
Boat (fig.19)—were photographed in the same 1962 shot,
which made them by then close to two years old. New works
made for the exhibition were relatively small or easy to create:
Traveling Life (1964), Macaroni Girl (ca. 1963), and some
household objects. In other words, she hardly made new large
works in 1963, except for one sewn soft sculpture, Dressing
Table, registered in her inventory and one Arm Chair signed as
1963.85
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Fig. 19: Kusama, Driving Image Show

with Row Boat, 1964

Previous page:
Fig. 18: Kusama, Driving Image Show
with Ten Guest Table, 1964

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86. Kusama with Brown, “Kusama,
Kusama, Kusama.”
87. Taketomo’s notes found in
Kusama’s personal archives are all
written in Japanese.
88. Kusama, Infinity Net, 49.
She compensated for the decreased production by her
ingenious ideas, extending her painterly engagement with
“infinity” into three dimensions. For her “Floor Show” (fig.20),
presented at Castellane Gallery in November 1965, she
deployed mirror reflections to create an infinite space from
several floor panels. Although they were covered with her
signature, fabric-made protuberances, their sizes were
relatively large—and much less labor-intensive than her earlier
and smaller stuffed protrusions. She pushed the concept of
reflection further in 1966, when she had the central piece
fabricated to her specifications for “Kusama’s Peep Show”
(fig.21) also at Castellane Gallery, which opened in March,
altogether eliminating the need for her own manual labor.
Her decreased ability to engage in any elaborate work, in
turn, forced her to enhance her conceptual approach. As she
later explained, “Freudian sexual components are certainly
present,”86 and her work began to resonate with psychiatric
symbolism. It was related to her suppressed sexuality during
her childhood, about which she most likely learned in her
sessions with Taketomo, the second psychiatrist whom she
regularly met for counseling in Japanese after the November
1962 hospitalization.87 At any rate, her art making ceased to be
compulsive after 1962.
Narcissus Garden a n d B e y o n d
In June 1966, at the 33rd Venice Biennale, Kusama proudly
presented Narcissus Garden, fifteen hundred mechanically
produced shining mirror-balls on two lawns in front of the
Italian Pavilion. The oldest international contemporary art
exhibition, the Venice Biennale has been known as “the
Olympics of art.” The artists representing the world’s 30
leading nations that maintained pavilions at the Venetian park
of Giardini competed for the awards given by the exhibition’s
committee. Having gained official permission from the
biennale bureau,88 Kusama participated independently (fig.22),
thus questioning the production of artistic values, which was
not determined by the work of art alone, but by governments,
collectors, curators, critics, and dealers—an interwoven system
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Fig. 20 : Kusama, Floor Show, Castellane Gallery, New York, 1965

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Fig. 21: Kusama’s Peep Show, Castellane Gallery, New York, 1966
Fig. 22: Narcissus Garden, Venice Biennale, 1966

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catalogue 17/01/09 16:20 Page 104
manuscript, “‘Narushisusu Gāden’ to
89. Kusama, unpublished Japanese
geijutsu no jiyū to kaihō”
[“‘Narcissus Garden’ and freedom
and liberation of art,”], 1966, in
Kusama Archives, 1.
90. In her writings, Kusama states
clearly that the performers she hired
were mainly homosexuals. For
example, see Kusama Infinity Net,
191. Although further research on
her performance participants is
necessary, the person who appears
in almost all the documentation
photographs of her performances,
James Golata, was, indeed, a
homosexual.
91. Laura Hoptman, “Down to Zero:
Yayoi Kusama and the European
‘New Tendency,’” Love Forever:
Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968, exh. cat.
(Los Angeles: Los Angeles County
Museum, 1998), 50. According to the
Department of State Decimal file,
after a controversial Advancing
American Art exhibition in 1946 until
the 1964 Biennale, the U.S.
government ceased funding U.S.
contemporary art exhibitions abroad.
See, RG 59, 250 Department of State
Decimal File, 1945-1949 (College
Park, MD: National Archives).
Fig. 23-24: Narcissus Garden,
Venice Biennale, 1966
of politics and commerce. Kusama’s Narcissus Garden was thus
a controversial work. Preserving the “mystery”89 of art, the
beauty of the work spoke by and for itself; her site-specific
installation captured the attention of her audience. However,
when she began selling each ball that she called “your
Narcissism,” (fig.23) for 1,200 liras, or $2 each, not as a
precious object but as a commodity, she provoked the Biennale
officials and the performance was promptly terminated.
An ingenious strategy for institutional critique, Narcissus
Garden was also the third Kusama work to use the mirrors,
which demonstrated a way of opening up her earlier, self-
reflexive and self-contained works to society. The first mirrored
piece, “Floor Show” (fig.20), was an enclosure that trapped
the viewer, in an endless reflection of him/herself. The second
was “Kusama’s Peep Show” (fig.21), in which any physical
access to the mirrored enclosure was denied. Only two
onlookers could look inside the hexagonal box, through its two
facing openings. Their reflections would intermix, infinitely
bouncing on the mirrored walls, or “I” would begin to mix
with the “Other” in this inaccessible space. Finally, in her
outdoor installation of 1,500 mirror-balls, while “I” would be
continuously reflected on the mirror-surfaces, the outdoor
installation allowed the whole world around to enter into the
matrix as it was reflected on the mirrored surfaces. Bringing
the mirrored reflections outdoors, Narcissus Garden finally
enabled physical communication between “I” and her
audience (fig.24). It thus set off the social process of liberating
the “I.” After this work, Kusama interestingly shifted to the
idea of sexual liberation, by mainly hiring homosexual models
for her works in order to destabilize socially conceived notions
of sexuality.90
In interpreting this layered and complex work, the curator
Laura Hoptman perceptively tied Kusama’s institutional
critique to the 1964 Venice Biennale, wherein the grand prize
of painting was awarded to Robert Rauschenberg. To the
European art world the event signaled “the definitive transfer
of cultural power from Paris to New York.”91 The 1964 Biennale
gave the dealer Leo Castelli (née Krausz, 1907-1999)—an
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92. In retrospect, about 50% of
Castelli Gallery’s stable of artists in
the 1970s were Bellamy’s picks.
93. According to Calvin Tomkins,
“What Castelli really sold, according
to Barbara Rose, was a sense of art
history.” In the same article, Tomkins
also described how Castelli sold
Frank Stella’s early black painting to
the Museum of Modern Art below
the price that required the museum
board’s approval. See Calvin
Tomkins, “Profiles: A Good Eye and
Good Ear,” The New Yorker (May 26,
1980); clippings in “Tomkins 6.17,”
MoMA Archives.
Austro-Hungarian Jew who fled from Paris to New York in
1941— an opportunity to build his international reputation.
Having lost both his parents in the war, he was deeply
disillusioned by European culture and committed to
establishing a new American art. This opportunity came in
1962 when the government appointed one of his clients, Alan
Solomon, the then director of the Jewish Museum, as a
Biennale commissioner for 1964. Not surprisingly, four out of
eight artists selected belonged to Leo Castelli’s stable,
Rauschenberg being one of them.
Castelli was not an aesthete-connoisseur, but an acute
observer of the scene, who had a huge admiration for
Bellamy’s taste. When Green Gallery closed in May 1965,
Castelli met Bellamy and took on many of the Green Gallery
artists, including Judd, Flavin, and ultimately Oldenburg.92 The
artists from Castelli’s gallery would go on to be considered key
representatives of American painting and sculpture of the later
twentieth century. What Castelli controlled was a sense of art
history by using his collectors. The earliest client of the gallery
was MoMA’s Alfred H. Barr Jr. It has been recorded that in one
instance, Castelli sold him a work by his young talent below
the price that would have required the museum board’s
approval. By bringing together a tightly knit group of collectors
who included major museum curators, Castelli placed works by
his gallery artists in major museums, most notably, the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, which served as a path
breaker for other museums.93 He also had a gift for
manipulating the press, with such Castelli-associated collectors
as Robert Scull, for one, projecting an outsized media persona.
During the sixties, being on the boards of major museums,
gaining prominence in the art world, and getting recognized
by those attending museum openings were fast becoming the
ultimate goal of a certain sector of the socially ambitious.
What Kusama termed as “your Narcissism,” in a sense,
resonated with the pride and social aspirations of the people
in the art world. In Narcissus Garden, she simulated a
miniature commercial circuit of works of art through her
mirror-balls.
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94. Kusama’s notebook (no. 3). The
date of the notebook is most likely
1965, based on the listed travel
schedules that began in Milan in
January 1966.
95. Ibid.
96. Kusama, letter to Perry.
97. Kusama, Fujimoto, Ibe., 21.
When Green Gallery closed in May 1965, that fall, Kusama
recorded in her notebook her acute pain of being left further
behind by those whom she thought to be her peers.94 She
instructed herself: “Never call Donald [Judd],” “Never give any
work to [Frank] Stella,” and “Never go to Oldenburg’s studio.”
Her struggle in good part, to reiterate, derived from the fact
that she was a Japanese woman in an art world that mainly
privileged Anglo-American male artists. But because of this
difficulty, she was able to develop her art in unique ways. It
was during this time that she affirmed afresh five principles: 1.
Carry out my original intention, 2. Have foresight, 3. Never
monumentalize, 4. Never compromise, and 5. Be ambitious.95 If
her access to the mainstream art world had been too easy,
then she might not have come across the ideas of her anti-
monumental soft sculpture. Nor would she have created art
that derived from her psychotic state, or a site-specific outdoor
installation. She thought ultimately it was more effective to
show at an unconventional venue “than to hold the show at
the third-class gallery in [sic] uptown.”96
Her unconventional thinking and her deep despair about
the art world finally led Kusama to draft her 1966 statement,
helped along by the critics Jay Jacobs and Gordon Brown, and
to the simultaneous invention of another signature motif,
polka-dots.97 From the fall of 1965 to the winter of 1966,
Kusama randomly laid out some new ideas in her notebook,
including “Narcissus,” “‘Dotty’ Kusama,” “Crazy K,” “Net
Obsession,” “Lying on Phallic Sofa,” “Obsession,” and
“Repetitive Vision.” (The word “dotty” is defined by the
standard Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as “mentally
unbalanced, crazy, amiably eccentric, being obsessed, or
infatuated, amusingly absurd, and ridiculous.”)
“I’ve been ill,” Kusama wrote to the critic Lucy Lippard on
November 3, 1966. Immediately after Lucas Samaras
premiered his distinctive “Mirror Room” at the internationally
renowned Pace Gallery in October 1966, Kusama was again
suffering from anxiety neurosis. Samaras’s exhibition opened
seven months after “Kusama’s Peep Show,” which took place
at the little known Richard Castellane Gallery. According to
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98. Alan Solomon, “An Interview Samaras, his latest work emerged out of reworking an earlier
with Lucas Samaras,” Artforum
(October 1966): 39-44. Diane
idea of using mirrors.98 However, even to his closest associate,
Waldman, “Samaras: Reliquaries for the critic Kim Levin, Samaaras’s work evoked “Kusama’s Peep
St. Sade,” Art News (October 1966), Show.”99 Although the two works showed remarkable
44-46, 72-75,
99. By mentioning Samaras’s Mirror resemblances, according to Oldenburg, Kusama’s art was
Room, Levin pointed out “Kusama’s viewed as not “central to the scene,”100 whereas Samaras’s
work can raise a number of prickly
who-did-it-first questions.” But she
exhibition resulted in a six-page interview article in Artforum
listened to Samaras, who “told me, and a seven-page special feature in Art News,101 both from
pointing out that he’d made that October.
mirrored boxes and envisioned
mirror rooms in drawings and stories By this time, it became painfully clear to Kusama that no
since the early ‘60s” and concluded matter how hard she toiled, her work would never be seriously
that, “who did it first may be
irrelevant.” Kim Levin, “Odd Woman
accepted in the mainstream art world. She decided that the art
Out.” In his interview, Oldenburg world was a “farce,”102 and launched her new campaign. She
also pointed out affinities between invented a new persona, the “polka-dot priestess,” and began
Kusama and Samaras’s obsessional
behavior (CICA/ATT/001/47). promoting her mental disorder as a kind of curiosity, as
100. Ibid. evidenced by her statement, prepared with Brown, titled:
101. Kusama, letter to Lucy Lippard,
November 3, 1966 (“Lucy Lippard”
“Kusama, Kusama, Kusama (World’s First Obsessional
file, the Archives of American Art, Artist).”103 Her emphasis on her mental disorder arising out of
Washington, D.C.). a woman’s social experience constituted by far her bitterest
102. Kusama’s studio manager in
1968 and 1969, Golata recalled that social critique. She believed fervently that one’s sex should
she used to call the art world never be a criterion for good or bad art.104
chaban, or “farce.” James Golata,
telephone interview by Alexandra
At the same time, Kusama had foresight. When Castelli’s
Munroe, January 11, 1989 business acquired global prominence in the seventies, his
(CICA/ATT/001.38). I once asked artists, being popular all over the world, were stretched thin
Kusama whether she actually
considered the art world as chaban. and needed to run their studios as big production houses in
Kusama looked down to hide her order to meet the high demand of the global art market. In
expression, but I noticed a big grin
on her face. Kusama, interview by
effect, these artists became business owners. Kusama, on the
Yamamura, July 28, 2006. other hand, preserved her creative freedom by dropping out
103. Kusama with Brown, “Kusama, (for a while) from the commercial art world and engaging in
Kusama, Kusama.”
104. Judd testified that Kusama was psychedelic performances. Her shift from a bourgeois to a
“very ambivalent about being a popular audience also transformed the nature of her art. The
woman.” Also, to many artists and
historians, her work was regarded as
light artist Joshua White, one of her collaborators at Fillmore
a “willful seizure of [the] phallus.” East (fig.25), recollected that in the psychedelic culture, people
See for example, Pamela Wye, “Yayoi went not for what the market told them to embrace, but for
Kusama: In Between the Outside and
Inside,” M/E/A/N/I/N/G, no. 15 “what they truly liked,” and Kusama was one of the most
(1994), 40. adored artists in that culture.105
105. Joshua White, telephone
interview by Yamamura, February 12,
2006. I thank Kerry Brougher for
introducing me to White.

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Fig. 25: Kusama’s Self-Obliteration at Fillmore East, New York, December 6-7, 1968

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106. For Kusama working on small
pieces between 1973 and 1975, see,
for example, Reiko Tomii, “Yayoi
Kusama, A Snake” in
Warhol/Kusama, exh. brochure (New
York: D’Amelio Terras, 1997).
***
By way of conclusion, I would like to address the question
with which I began this essay: When did Kusama repaint Flower
Spirit? The answer lies in the most conspicuous addition, the
“net,” long known as one of her trademark motifs. Since she
invented the motif in 1959 and her early oil paintings were left in
Japan, the probable date for the re-working is between 1973 and
1975, when Kusama transferred her early works from the family’s
storage space to the main house. Due to the medication she
received in the United States, she had to relearn how to make art
on a smaller scale.106 By the early 1970s, the nets and dots were
firmly established as significant aspects of her art. Thus she may
very well have added her hallmark “net” onto Flower Spirit,
while retouching it.
Her signature and the date of Flower Spirit must have been
added much later, most likely in the 1990s. After her return to
Japan in 1973, Kusama suffered outright neglect from
established art critics in Tokyo, whom she had kept abreast of
her activities during the 1960s and helped when they visited
New York, as recorded in her calendar-diary between 1960 and
1963. Once in Japan, however, Kusama was the victim of male
chauvinism: these male critics had a difficult time accepting
her highly prolific past abroad. Not a single gallery offered her
an exhibition between 1973 and 1975. Her distress led once
again to another nervous breakdown in 1975. Still, with her
innate strength and wit, even though she was acutely ill and
often bloated with medication, Kusama came up with a
solution, similar to her 1966 statement.
In November 1975, a month before her first solo exhibition
at Nishimura Gallery in Tokyo, she published a key essay,
“Odyssey of My Struggling Soul,” in the art magazine Geijutsu
Seikatsu (Art Life), examining her psychosis, which she traced
to her childhood. Thereafter, her reputation in Japan rapidly
improved, while the interpretation of her work became
increasingly linked to her psychosis. By 1988, a year before her
first U.S. retrospective, her biography in the catalogue
accompanying her solo exhibition at Fuji Television Gallery
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107. “Kusama Yayoi Biography” in
Soul Burning Flashes, exh. cat.
(Tokyo: Fuji Television Gallery, 1988).
108. Jun’ichi Nakajima, the curator
of this retrospective remembers
going to Kusama’s home in
Matsumoto and fetching her early
works for this retrospective. Since
Kusama was the only person who
knew of her works, the show was
virtually curated by the artist herself.
Jun’ichi Nakajima, interview by
author, April 10, 2008.
109. According to Kusama’s studio
staff, the artist usually signs her
work not each time the work was
completed, but just before the works
leaving her studio. This is evident in
Takako Matsumoto’s 2008
documentary film on Kusama. Takako
Matsumoto, I Adore Myself (Tokyo:
BBB, 2008).
stated that in her adolescence, she was “able to see aurora
around objects” and she “created many works out of her
hallucinatory vision.”107 The latter view has since been echoed
in mainstream interpretations of her work.
She most likely inscribed the dates on most of the pre-
at Kitakyūshū Municipal Museum of Art in March 1987.108 In
United States works just before her first museum retrospective
preparation, she assembled her early oils—which previously
did not bear dates and signatures, as evidenced in exhibition
photographs from 1952—and signed and dated them all at
once, as she often does before an exhibition.109 Thus the color
oils are identical. Excluded from the Kitakyūshū exhibition,
and style of signatures inscribed on the front side of her early
Flower Spirit could have been signed and dated much later
than 1987. Indeed, the color of her signature is slightly more
whitish than those included in the 1987 exhibition. Why did
she antedate Flower Spirit? Since Flower Spirit clearly shows
an unsure and confused understanding of technique, it would
have seemed premature to her. Yet, because it bore the visual
sign of her alleged psychotic symptom, the “net,” she likely
gave it a date earlier than her other mixed-media works,
legitimizing her biographical myth of hallucination.
These observations about Flower Spirit inevitably lead us to
another, now very well-known drawing by Kusama at the age
her Kitakyūshū retrospective—the dots marked on and around
of ten. In this untitled drawing (fig.26)—also excluded from
the woman’s face are much finer and darker than the larger
circles appearing on her dress and in the background. From the
pencil stroke that flows diagonally from the upper left hand
side, the original drawing captured a woman standing in a
snowstorm (Matsumoto being famous as snow country). Since
the drawing was taken out of a sketchbook, we cannot
possibly know if all the other pages, now missing or lost, also
bore similar dots. Suffice it to say, however, that we have to
consider the possibility of her also reworking this childhood
drawing. Clearly, Kusama’s artistry needs to be reevaluated
and reinterpreted beyond conventional biographical myth, by
directly and honestly engaging with her work.
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Fig. 26: Kusama, Untitled, ca. 1939

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Notes
I would like to extend my utmost gratitude to the artist Yayoi Kusama for
granting me interviews and making valuable materials accessible to me, and
to staff members of Kusama Yayoi Studio. I am grateful to the curators Franck
Gautherot, Jaap Guldemond, and Seungduk Kim for inviting me to participate
in this catalog. I am also indebted to Reiko Tomii for reading this essay since
its earliest stages. I am grateful to the Education Department of the Museum
of Modern Art, the Fellowship Office of the Smithsonian American Art
Museum, the Getty Research Institute, the University of Akron, and the
organizers of the panel “Art Market as a Cultural Transfer” at the College Art
Association Conference, New York, 2007, for opportunities to present prior
versions of this essay. I thank the following individuals and institutions: Ed
Clark, Geoffrey Batchen, Kerry Brougher, Tom Doyle, Mayumi Kawamura,
Franklin Odo, Akie Terai, Takako Matsumoto, Heather Lenz, Virginia
Mecklenburg, Cynthia Navaretta, Akira Shibutami, Judith Stein, Hideki Sugino,
Joshua White, Mario and Helen Yrissary, Terra Foundation for Arts, the Ford
Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the City University of New
York Graduate Center. Last but not least, I am deeply indebted to my doctoral
dissertation adviser Anna C. Chave for her feminist scholarship and teaching,
and my husband Luis H. Francia for his patience and unwavering support.

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author.

Major archival sources referenced in this essay are as follows:

A) Personal archives housed at Kusama Yayoi Studio in Tokyo include
Kusama’s calendars (1960-63); notebooks (No. 1, ca. 1959-60, with black-and-
white marble cover; No. 2, 1961-64, with green-and-white marble cover; No. 3,
1965, spiral bound). Other papers

B) The audio tape recordings, originally produced by the Center for

International Contemporary Arts, New York (no longer existent) for their Oral
History Archive, housed at the Fine Arts Library, the University of Texas at
Austin, is indicated by original ID code beginning with CICA/ATT/001.

113