Yayoi Kusama's famous polka dots began as hallucinations she had at ten
As a child in Matsumoto, Yayoi Kusama saw fields of dots, talking flowers and fabric patterns that multiplied until they swallowed her. She called the feeling self-obliteration and spent her life painting it, becoming one of the best-selling female artists anywhere and an influence on Andy Warhol.
Born on 22 March 1929 into a merchant family that ran a plant nursery and seed farm, she drew pumpkins in primary school after visiting a seed-harvesting ground with her grandfather. Her mother tried to stop her art by taking her drawings away, and treated her harshly. The earliest known dot work is a 1939 drawing of a kimono-clad woman, probably her mother, blotted out by spots. Smooth white stones in a nearby riverbed were another source of the fixation.
At 13, during the Pacific War, she was put to work in a military factory making parachutes for the army, and later said the experience taught her to prize personal and creative freedom. In 1948 she studied the Japanese painting style nihonga in Kyoto but grew frustrated with it and looked to the European and American avant-garde instead. She moved to New York in 1958. There her Infinity Nets, canvases sometimes longer than 30 feet covered in loops and dots, and later happenings in which naked participants were painted with bright polka dots, made her a fixture of the 1960s scene.
Interest faded in the 1970s, then revived in the 1980s. From the 1970s onward she lived in a mental health facility and spoke openly about it, telling an interviewer in 2012 that making art was the only thing she had found that eased her illness. Critics link her work to pop art, minimalism, surrealism and feminism, though the Metropolitan Museum notes she was never formally part of Surrealism, even as she corresponded with Shuzo Takiguchi, one of its leading advocates in Japan.
She worked across sculpture, installation, painting, performance, fashion, poetry and fiction. Sotheby's placed her 19th in its 2023 list of top 50 artists. She kept making work in museums worldwide until her death on 14 August 2026.
Source: Yayoi Kusama
