Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 in the provincial city of Matsumoto, in Japan’s Nagano Prefecture. Situated approximately in the centre of Japan’s main island, Honshu, Matsumoto is characterised by an abundance of nature and views of mountain peaks. Kusama was the fourth child born into a family that operated a nursery business and employed many workers. The family owned both a farm on a large piece of land, where seeds were collected, and a greenhouse, which was a rarity at the time.
Kusama’s girlhood was spent amid fields of flowers, and sketching them was a daily activity. Although she had a keen eye and exceptional drawing ability, hers was a normal, everyday childhood. There came a moment, however, when Kusama realised her feelings differed from those of people around her:
One day, after gazing at a pattern of red flowers on the tablecloth, I looked up to see that the ceiling, the windows, and the columns seemed to be plastered with the same red floral pattern. I saw the entire room, my entire body, and the entire universe covered with red flowers, and in that instant my soul was obliterated.1 Yayoi Kusama, trans. Ralph McCarthy, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, Tate Publishing, London, 2013, p. 69.
The space before her eyes would become covered in polka dots or nets (although, at the time, she didn’t understand the forms as such) and animals would speak to her with human voices. These sensations would assail Kusama unexpectedly and, despite being products of her own mind, troubled the young girl. Because no one else sensed these things, it was difficult for people around Kusama to understand her, and consequently she became frightened by the gap between the real and the imagined.
In order to escape the terror of these hallucinations, Kusama captured their images on paper. This act not only saved her from plunging into the dark depths of her mind, but also made it possible for others to recognise ‘something’ in Kusama’s spiritual world.
In the portrait Kusama drew of her mother at about age ten, we catch a glimpse of the girl’s world of internal images. Kusama’s mother is depicted wearing a kimono, facing downwards, eyes closed and brimming with a gentle smile. In contrast to her expression, however, the background is filled completely with vigorous lines. Mixing these two different expressions in the same scene produced a sense of discord. It is also worth noting that countless polka dot–like things fill the scene. I intentionally say ‘polka dot–like things’ because, at this early stage, Kusama was simply drawing what she saw and felt with her own eyes, before she could understand the shapes. It is the difference between ‘what was seen’ and ‘what was found’. The ‘polka dots’ that are emblematic of Kusama’s work today represent one of the answers she arrived at after spending a long time coming to terms with her hallucinations and repeatedly analysing herself. Although they undoubtedly have their origin in her childhood, there is a distinction between the polka dot–like things that were the object of her childhood terror and Kusama’s present-day, self-described ‘polka dots’ that condense the themes of love, peace and eternity.
Unconsciously, through the act of creation, Kusama had gained the means to suppress the terror within herself. At the same time, she must have become aware that these visions were inseparable from her being. She could have attempted to forget or escape from the terror; however, Kusama’s response was not to reject it, but rather to coexist with it.
Given her psychological predisposition and will to harness her visions, the young Kusama’s decision to dedicate her life to art may, in retrospect, seem almost inevitable. However, her family were opposed to her becoming an artist. Her mother, in particular, did not want her daughter to know the same hardship she experienced managing the family business, passed down through her side of the family for generations. She hoped the girl would someday marry into a wealthy family. That Kusama’s mother repeatedly tried to convince her daughter to reconsider her path was only natural as a loving parent. However, to Kusama it felt like a rejection of the life she aspired to and, by extension, a rejection of herself. Furthermore, Kusama has reminisced on many occasions how the personal differences between her parents had a tremendous effect on her. Her father was a libertine, which enraged her hard-working mother, and seeing their disconnect cast a shadow on Kusama’s heart during childhood.
Another influence on Kusama’s time in Matsumoto was the Second World War. As many young men went off to fight in the Pacific War, Kusama worked producing fabric for parachutes at a munitions factory, as part of the student mobilisation. As the war intensified, more than four thousand students evacuated Tokyo for the inland city of Matsumoto. With materials and food in short supply, Kusama was unable to continue drawing pictures.
Kusama’s immediate environment became central to her artistic development. At this time, most of Kusama’s works had plant themes or some element suggesting them. Created when she was about sixteen, Untitled (Flower Sketches), c. 1945, is a detailed study of a plant’s petals and stem, and is closer to an exercise in observation than a sketch.
After graduating from primary school, Kusama entered Nagano Prefecture Matsumoto Girls’ High School, where she met a valuable artistic sympathiser in Nihonga painter Kakei Hibino, who was teaching art there.2Kakei (actual first name, Masao) Hibino (1915–99), born in what is now Azumino city, Nagano Prefecture, was a Japanese-style painter and worked as an art teacher in Nagano Prefecture. Hibino recognised Kusama’s talent – so much so that he personally instructed her in drawing after school and visited Kusama’s home on a number of occasions to beg her parents to let her follow the path of art.
When Kusama graduated from high school in November 1945, just after the end of the war, a public-entry exhibition was held in Nagano Prefecture. She submitted work in the exhibition’s Nihonga painting category and it was selected for inclusion. Harvest, c. 1945, is a Japanese-style painting depicting harvested grain. The work is rendered with precise strokes, displaying advanced technique, and is thoroughly true to its subject. The sketching Kusama had worked on since childhood, as well as Hibino’s instruction in the fundamentals of painting, had borne fruit.
Unsurprisingly, the following year Kusama again submitted a work, titled Pumpkin, 1946, in the exhibition’s Nihonga painting category. Pumpkins would become one of her principal motifs, so it is fascinating that she was already incorporating them in her art as a teenager. Kusama became acquainted with pumpkins when she was in primary school, among the profusion of flowers in her family’s seed field:
I parted a row of zinnias and reached in to pluck the pumpkin from its vine. It immediately began speaking to me in a most animated manner … What appealed to me most was the pumpkin’s generous unpretentiousness. That and its solid spiritual balance.3 Kusama, Infinity Net, pp. 75–76. Originally published in Japanese in Yayoi Kusama, ‘Me inside the pumpkin’, Hanga Geijutsu, no. 103, 1999.
Ever since, pumpkins have been an important artistic theme for Kusama. Not as objects of terror, but as precious things sympathetic to her sensibility.
In 1948, Kusama transferred to the senior class of the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts. While she wanted to study art, Kusama was even more enamoured with the idea of living away from her parents. Her valued teacher Hibino encouraged Kusama to make the move, and her parents, opposed as they were to her becoming an artist, seem to have agreed to let her go to Kyoto as an extension of her studies. She enrolled in the Nihonga painting program, but the school was not what Kusama desired. To her, Kyoto’s traditional apprenticeship system and art circles seemed archaic and constrained. However, it was here that she learnt how to sketch and paint in earnest, providing the foundation for her later expressions. In Untitled (Monkey Sketches/Zoo Drawings), c. 1948, where realistic sketches of monkeys in the zoo fill the page, there is a sense of Kusama extending herself in trying to capture the monkeys’ expressions and gestures.
After returning to Matsumoto, Kusama’s manner of expression started to shift from traditional techniques and materials towards something uniquely her own. Her negative experiences and impatience with her time in Kyoto may have pushed her even more towards personalised creation. Staying in her room, Kusama continued to draw, day and night. Naturally, things did not go well with her family.
Making a complete turnaround in technique from Nihonga painting, Kusama started using oil paints, watercolours and pastels, allowing her to capture the images flowing from her mind with spontaneity. She managed to purchase painting materials without her parents’ knowledge; no matter how many canvases she purchased, however, it was never enough. After some consideration, Kusama cut open a grain sack used for holding milkvetch seeds and nailed it to a wooden frame. Because paint wouldn’t stick to the rough hemp cloth, she put gelatin adhesive on her hand, thrust it in a bucket of sand and spread it on the cloth, then painted layers of plaster on top to create her own canvas. Accumulation of the Corpses (Prisoner Surrounded by the Curtain of Depersonalization), 1950, is likely one of the rare surviving works made using this method. The sand mixed into the canvas gives this painting a uniquely grainy, matte texture. Undulations receding into the depths of the picture give a sense of plant roots and pulsating veins. Is there a withered tree visible in the centre of the whirlpool? Is it a coincidence that the sand and pebbles incorporated in the canvas align with the work’s subject, or is it part of how Kusama intuitively expresses herself? At the very least, the work displays an instinctive choice of materials and theme. Withered plants with undulating stems often appear in works made by Kusama in her early twenties, before she started expressing herself with nets and polka dots. Before arriving at her present-day motifs, Kusama expressed her mind impulsively on paper and canvas in the form of familiar plant imagery.
In 1952, she held her first solo exhibition at the age of twenty-two. Held for only two days, 18 and 19 March, at Matsumoto’s First Community Centre, the exhibition featured more than two hundred artworks created in only a few months. The oil paintings, watercolours and sketches covering the walls activated the space with the graphic discord in Kusama’s mind.
At her solo exhibition, Kusama met Dr Shihō Nishimaru, Shinshu University’s inaugural professor of psychiatry, who had moved from Tokyo to Matsumoto only a few years earlier.4Shihō Nishimaru (1910–2002) was born in Tokyo and, after graduating from Tokyo Imperial University’s Faculty of Medicine, was a lecturer at the University of Tokyo and became the first professor of psychiatry at Shinshu University in 1949. Intrigued by the rare notion of a solo exhibition of abstract painting staged in the country, Nishimaru stopped by and was amazed by the collection of artworks that filled the space. While talking with Kusama, he noticed the worries that weighed on her.
Sensing something in Kusama that he could not overlook, Nishimaru used all the money he had with him to purchase some of her artworks. In December of the same year, he presented Kusama’s artwork to the Kanto Society of Psychiatry and Neurology meeting held at Tokyo University’s Faculty of Medicine. This led to a solo exhibition of Kusama’s work being held in Tokyo. Nishimaru also urged Kusama to leave her home in order to gain peace of mind, sparing no effort to assist her when she later headed to the United States. He subsequently continued to counsel Kusama throughout her time in America.
Kusama’s second solo exhibition, held a mere six months after her first, featured works by renowned conceptual artist Yutaka Matsuzawa and two other guest artists.5 Yutaka Matsuzawa (1922–2006) was born in Shimosuwa town, Nagano Prefecture, and after having a revelation to ‘vanish objects’ in 1964, pursued artistic expression through language without using objects. Matsuzawa was a pioneer of conceptual art in Japan. Respected art critic Shūzō Takiguchi contributed to the exhibition leaflet.6Shūzō Takiguchi (1903–79), born in Toyama Prefecture, was an art critic, poet and artist representative of modern Japan. Takiguchi made efforts to promote avant-garde art movements such as Surrealism and exhibited many young artists at Takemiya Gallery. This level of recognition was unprecedented for a solo exhibition by an artist barely twenty years old. Through interactions with not only Matsuzawa but also other artists and cultural figures, Kusama managed to understand the special position she occupied, and became keenly aware of what she should do next.
Takiguchi provided a letter of recommendation for Kusama’s solo exhibition at Shirokiya Department Store in Tokyo in 1954, and the following year he selected her to hold a solo exhibition at Takemiya Gallery in Tokyo. That same year, Takiguchi also recommended Kusama for the International Watercolor Exhibition: 18th Biennial held at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. At the same time as she was holding these solo exhibitions, Kusama moved closer towards realising her long-held plan to escape her hometown and Japan.
In 1953, the year after her first solo exhibition in Matsumoto, Kusama was planning to go to France, but abandoned the idea once her solo exhibition in Tokyo was arranged. Despite increasing opportunities to present her work in Japan, and her growing local reputation, Kusama’s desire to travel overseas didn’t fade. And then, the fateful moment unexpectedly occurred. In an art volume she picked up at a used bookstore in Matsumoto, paintings by American artist Georgia O’Keeffe leapt out at her.7 Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), born in Wisconsin, United States, was an artist renowned for abstract paintings with flower or cow-skull motifs. Kusama anticipated that if she asked O’Keeffe for help directly, something might come of it. Searching out her address at the American embassy, Kusama sent a letter along with a few watercolour paintings, and was fortunate enough to receive a letter of encouragement back from O’Keeffe. Communicating with O’Keeffe turned Kusama’s tentative desire to go to America into firm resolve.
In contrast to Kusama’s determination to travel, her mother was still vehemently opposed to her becoming an artist, and there was no way she would allow her to go to the United States. For years, mother and daughter argued for days on end. Eventually, the mother’s opposition was overcome by her daughter’s stubbornness, and she gave in. There was a mountain of issues to be resolved before Kusama could emigrate – travel permits, travel expenses, a guarantor overseas, and so on. Aided by her parents, relatives, Nishimaru and others, Kusama persistently cleared the numerous hurdles and made it a reality.
Before leaving, Kusama destroyed almost all works she had created to date. Confident that she would create better works in a distant land, and concerned about leaving work where she wasn’t accepted, Kusama burned hundreds of drawings on the riverbank near her home. This was a rite of leaving her hometown and the version of herself who had lived there. On 18 November 1957, Kusama set off for America alone.
At the time, Kusama’s hometown of Matsumoto was an insular region that showed no signs of recognising her creative endeavours. She was forbidden from drawing as a young girl, yet continued to sketch furtively on small scraps of paper and managed to find valuable sympathisers in Kakei Hibino and Dr Shihō Nishimaru. Kusama’s birth in 1929 also coincided with the start of the Great Depression, dealing a major blow to Japan’s economy and the Kusama family’s business. What Kusama describes as her ‘miserable childhood’ was due in part to serious distress accumulated from the combination of this historical backdrop, her home environment and her inner world, which she couldn’t fully control.
A craving for love and peace, which Kusama was unable to enjoy, was the driving force behind her creations. Later, after self-analysis, symbols of hallucinations that were products of her mental discord were expressed through nets and polka dots, becoming Kusama’s unique and powerful artistic language. By linking these motifs with the memory of plants that had been a bastion for her inner thoughts during her time in Matsumoto, Kusama’s artistic vision attracted glowing recognition that would spread across the entire world.
Akira Shibutami is a curator at the Matsumoto City Museum of Art Nagano, Japan. He has overseen the permanent exhibition of Yayoi Kusama since 2002, when the museum was opened.
Notes
Yayoi Kusama, trans. Ralph McCarthy, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, Tate Publishing, London, 2013, p. 69.
Kakei (actual first name, Masao) Hibino (1915–99), born in what is now Azumino city, Nagano Prefecture, was a Japanese-style painter and worked as an art teacher in Nagano Prefecture.
Kusama, Infinity Net, pp. 75–76. Originally published in Japanese in Yayoi Kusama, ‘Me inside the pumpkin’, Hanga Geijutsu, no. 103, 1999.
Shihō Nishimaru (1910–2002) was born in Tokyo and, after graduating from Tokyo Imperial University’s Faculty of Medicine, was a lecturer at the University of Tokyo and became the first professor of psychiatry at Shinshu University in 1949.
Yutaka Matsuzawa (1922–2006) was born in Shimosuwa town, Nagano Prefecture, and after having a revelation to ‘vanish objects’ in 1964, pursued artistic expression through language without using objects. Matsuzawa was a pioneer of conceptual art in Japan.
Shūzō Takiguchi (1903–79), born in Toyama Prefecture, was an art critic, poet and artist representative of modern Japan. Takiguchi made efforts to promote avant-garde art movements such as Surrealism and exhibited many young artists at Takemiya Gallery.
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), born in Wisconsin, United States, was an artist renowned for abstract paintings with flower or cow-skull motifs.